Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with S. James Gates Jr.

00:00:03.800 | He's a theoretical physicist

00:00:05.360 | and professor at Brown University,

00:00:07.320 | working on supersymmetry, supergravity,

00:00:09.840 | and superstring theory.

00:00:11.440 | He served on former President Obama's Council

00:00:14.240 | of Advisors on Science and Technology,

00:00:16.520 | and he's now the co-author of a new book

00:00:19.320 | titled "Proving Einstein Right"

00:00:21.600 | about the scientists who set out to prove

00:00:23.920 | Einstein's theory of relativity.

00:00:26.520 | You may have noticed that I've been speaking

00:00:28.440 | with not just computer scientists,

00:00:30.240 | but philosophers, mathematicians, physicists,

00:00:32.480 | economists, and soon, much more.

00:00:35.200 | To me, AI is much bigger than deep learning,

00:00:38.040 | bigger than computing.

00:00:39.360 | It is our civilization's journey

00:00:41.160 | into understanding the human mind

00:00:43.080 | and creating echoes of it in the machine.

00:00:45.760 | That journey includes, of course,

00:00:48.600 | the world of theoretical physics

00:00:50.360 | and its practice of first principles mathematical thinking

00:00:53.400 | and exploring the fundamental nature of our reality.

00:00:57.600 | This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

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00:03:05.480 | to dream of engineering a better world.

00:03:08.480 | And now here's my conversation with S. James Gates Jr.

00:03:12.680 | You tell a story when you were eight,

00:03:15.520 | you had a profound realization that the stars in the sky

00:03:18.240 | are actually places that we could travel to one day.

00:03:22.560 | Do you think human beings will ever venture

00:03:24.800 | outside our solar system?

00:03:26.280 | - Wow, the question of whether humanity

00:03:29.000 | gets outside of the solar system.

00:03:30.560 | It's gonna be a challenge.

00:03:31.800 | And as long as the laws of physics that we have today

00:03:36.320 | are accurate and valid,

00:03:38.320 | it's gonna be extraordinarily difficult.

00:03:40.880 | I'm a science fiction fan, as you probably know.

00:03:43.460 | So I love to dream of starships

00:03:45.600 | and traveling to other solar systems,

00:03:48.200 | but the barriers are just formidable.

00:03:52.520 | - If we just kind of venture a little bit

00:03:54.360 | into science fiction, do you think the spaceships,

00:03:57.040 | if we are successful, that take us outside the solar system

00:04:00.480 | will look like the ones we have today?

00:04:03.080 | Or are fundamental breakthroughs necessary?

00:04:07.520 | - In order to have genuine starships,

00:04:10.200 | probably some really radical views

00:04:12.960 | about the way the universe works

00:04:15.040 | are going to have to take place in our science.

00:04:17.960 | We could, with our current technology,

00:04:22.320 | think about constructing multi-generational starships

00:04:25.560 | where the people who get on them

00:04:27.320 | are not the people who get off at the other end.

00:04:29.820 | But even if we do that,

00:04:34.200 | the formidable problem is actually our bodies,

00:04:36.560 | which doesn't seem to be conscious for a lot of people.

00:04:41.160 | Even getting to Mars is gonna present this challenge

00:04:44.040 | because we live in this wonderful home,

00:04:47.360 | has a protective magnetic magnetosphere around it,

00:04:50.720 | and so we're shielded from cosmic radiation.

00:04:53.920 | Once you leave the shield,

00:04:56.800 | there are some estimates that, for example,

00:04:59.720 | if you sent someone to Mars,

00:05:01.280 | with our technology, probably about two years out there

00:05:04.440 | without the shield, they're gonna be bombarded.

00:05:06.960 | That means radiation, probably means cancer.

00:05:10.160 | So that's one of the most formal challenges,

00:05:12.840 | even if we could get over the technology.

00:05:16.280 | - Do you think, so Mars is a harsh place.

00:05:19.320 | Elon Musk, SpaceX, and other folks, NASA,

00:05:23.200 | are really pushing to put a human being on Mars.

00:05:25.880 | Do you think, again, forgive me for lingering

00:05:29.080 | in science fiction land for a little bit,

00:05:31.240 | do you think one day we may be able to colonize Mars?

00:05:34.360 | First, do you think we'll put a human on Mars,

00:05:37.760 | and then do you think we'll put many humans on Mars?

00:05:40.680 | - So first of all, I am extraordinarily convinced

00:05:45.460 | we will not put a human on Mars by 2030,

00:05:48.080 | which is a date that you often hear in the public debate.

00:05:50.920 | - What's the challenge there?

00:05:53.480 | What do you think?

00:05:54.320 | - So there are a couple of ways that I could slice this,

00:05:56.560 | but the one that I think is simplest

00:05:57.840 | for people to understand involves money.

00:05:59.960 | So you look at how we got to the moon in the 1960s.

00:06:05.400 | It was about 10 year duration between the challenge

00:06:08.260 | that President Kennedy laid out

00:06:10.240 | and our successfully landing a moon.

00:06:12.640 | I was actually here at MIT

00:06:14.320 | when that first moon landing occurred,

00:06:16.520 | so I remember watching it on TV.

00:06:18.240 | But how did we get there?

00:06:19.160 | Well, we had this extraordinarily technical agency

00:06:23.440 | of the United States government, NASA.

00:06:26.880 | It consumed about 5% of the country's economic output.

00:06:31.880 | And so you say 5% of the economic output

00:06:35.780 | over about a 10 year period gets us 250,000 miles in space.

00:06:40.400 | Mars is about 100 times farther.

00:06:43.480 | So you have at least 100 times the challenge,

00:06:45.520 | and we're spending about 1/10 of the funds

00:06:48.640 | that we spent then as a government.

00:06:50.800 | So my claim is that it's at least 1,000 times harder

00:06:54.360 | for me to imagine us getting to Mars by 2030.

00:06:58.000 | - And he had that part that you mentioned in the speech

00:07:00.400 | that I just have to throw in there of JFK,

00:07:03.880 | of we do these things not because they're easy,

00:07:06.120 | but because they're hard.

00:07:07.840 | That's such a beautiful line

00:07:09.080 | that I would love to hear a modern president say

00:07:11.880 | about a scientific endeavor.

00:07:13.720 | - Well, one day we live and hope

00:07:16.360 | that such a president will arise for our nation.

00:07:19.620 | But even if, like I said,

00:07:21.120 | even if you fix the technical problems,

00:07:24.920 | the biological engineering that I worry most about,

00:07:28.960 | however, I'm gonna go out on a limb here.

00:07:31.980 | I think that by 2090 or so, or 2100,

00:07:39.880 | or sometimes I say 120,

00:07:41.400 | I suspect we're gonna have a human on Mars.

00:07:44.040 | - Wow, so you think that many years out,

00:07:46.400 | first a few tangents.

00:07:48.040 | You said bioengineering is a challenge.

00:07:50.080 | What's the challenge there?

00:07:52.400 | - So as I said, the real problem with interstellar travel,

00:07:57.400 | aside from the technology challenges,

00:08:00.780 | the real problem is radiation.

00:08:03.240 | And how do you engineer either an environment or a body,

00:08:08.720 | because we see rapid advances going on in bioengineering.

00:08:12.880 | How do you engineer either a ship or a body

00:08:16.440 | so that something, some person that's recognizably human

00:08:21.440 | will survive the rigors of interplanetary space travel?

00:08:24.620 | It's much more difficult

00:08:25.840 | than most people seem to take into account.

00:08:28.180 | - So if we could linger on the 2090, 2100, 2120,

00:08:36.240 | sort of thinking of that kind of,

00:08:38.920 | and let's linger on money.

00:08:42.880 | - Okay.

00:08:43.720 | - So Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are pushing the cost,

00:08:48.720 | trying to push the cost down.

00:08:50.680 | I mean, this is, so do you have hope,

00:08:52.960 | as this actually a sort of a brilliant big picture scientist,

00:08:56.400 | do you think a business entrepreneur can take science

00:09:01.400 | and make it cheaper and get it out there faster?

00:09:04.920 | - So bending the cost curve,

00:09:06.840 | you'll notice that has been an anchor.

00:09:08.560 | This is the simplest way for me to discuss this with people

00:09:10.720 | about what the challenge is.

00:09:12.160 | So yes, bending the cost curve is certainly critical

00:09:16.280 | if we're going to be successful.

00:09:18.280 | Now, you ask about the endeavors that are out there now,

00:09:22.960 | sponsored by two very prominent American citizens,

00:09:25.400 | Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

00:09:28.120 | I'm disappointed actually in what I see

00:09:31.720 | in terms of the routes that are being pursued.

00:09:35.280 | So let me give you one example there,

00:09:36.800 | and this one is going to be a little bit more technical.

00:09:39.680 | So if you look at the kinds of rockets

00:09:41.480 | that both these organizations are creating,

00:09:45.160 | yes, it's wonderful reusable technology

00:09:47.360 | to see a rocket go up and land on its fins,

00:09:50.040 | just like it did in science fiction movies when I was a kid.

00:09:52.840 | That's astounding.

00:09:54.520 | But the real problem is those rockets,

00:09:58.960 | the technology that we're doing now

00:10:00.360 | is not really that different

00:10:02.160 | than what was used to go to the moon.

00:10:04.440 | And there are alternatives, it turns out.

00:10:06.600 | There's an engine called a flare engine, which,

00:10:09.480 | so a traditional rocket,

00:10:11.000 | if you look at the engine, it looks like a bell, right?

00:10:13.240 | And then the flame comes out the bottom.

00:10:15.000 | But there is a kind of engine called a flare engine,

00:10:17.400 | which is essentially, when you look at it,

00:10:20.280 | it looks like an exhaust pipe on like a fancy car

00:10:25.120 | that's long and elongated.

00:10:27.720 | And it's a type of rocket engine that we know,

00:10:30.880 | we know if there've been preliminary testing,

00:10:32.880 | we know it works.

00:10:34.200 | And it also is actually much more economical

00:10:36.800 | because what it does is allow you

00:10:38.840 | to vary the amount of thrust as you go up

00:10:41.040 | in a way that you cannot do

00:10:42.320 | with one of these bell-shaped engines.

00:10:44.400 | So you would think that an entrepreneur

00:10:48.920 | might try to have the breakthrough

00:10:51.640 | to use flare nozzles, as they're called,

00:10:55.080 | as a way to bend the cost curve.

00:10:56.720 | As we keep coming back, that's gonna be a big factor.

00:10:59.280 | But that's not happening.

00:11:00.640 | In fact, what we see is what I think of as incremental change

00:11:04.640 | in terms of our technology.

00:11:06.280 | So I'm not really very encouraged by what I personally see.

00:11:10.280 | - So incremental change won't bend the cost curve.

00:11:12.600 | - I don't see it.

00:11:14.240 | - Just linger on the sci-fi for one more question.

00:11:17.480 | - Sure.

00:11:19.000 | - Do you think we're alone in the universe?

00:11:20.960 | Are we the only intelligent form of life?

00:11:23.840 | - So there is a quote by Carl Sagan,

00:11:27.080 | which I really love when I hear this question.

00:11:30.400 | And I recall the quote, and it goes something like,

00:11:34.040 | "If we're the only conscious life in the universe,

00:11:38.480 | "it's a terrible waste of space."

00:11:40.920 | Because the universe is an incredibly big place.

00:11:45.080 | And when Carl made that statement,

00:11:47.280 | we didn't know about the profusion of planets

00:11:50.520 | that are out there.

00:11:51.760 | In the last decade, we've discovered over 1,000 planets,

00:11:56.240 | and a substantial number of those planets are Earth-like

00:11:59.720 | in terms of being in the Goldilocks zone, as it's called.

00:12:04.260 | So it's, in my mind, it's practically inconceivable

00:12:09.260 | that we're the only conscious form of life in the universe.

00:12:13.560 | But that doesn't mean they've come to visit us.

00:12:15.980 | - Do you think they would look,

00:12:17.160 | do you think we'll recognize alien life if we saw it?

00:12:21.340 | Do you think it'd look anything like the carbon-based,

00:12:24.320 | the biological system we have on Earth today?

00:12:27.240 | - It would depend on that life's native environment

00:12:31.280 | in which it arose.

00:12:32.720 | If that environment was sufficiently like our environment,

00:12:36.440 | there's a principle in biology and nature called convergence

00:12:39.400 | which is that even if you have two biological systems

00:12:42.480 | that are totally separated from each other,

00:12:44.760 | if they face similar conditions,

00:12:47.120 | nature tends to converge on solutions.

00:12:49.560 | And so there might be similarities if this alien life form

00:12:54.440 | was born in a place that's kind of like this place.

00:12:57.960 | - Physics appears to be quite similar,

00:13:00.760 | the laws of physics across the entirety of the universe.

00:13:04.060 | Do you think weirder things than we see on Earth

00:13:07.040 | can spring up out of the same kinds of laws of physics?

00:13:10.440 | - From the laws of physics, I would say yes.

00:13:12.960 | First of all, if you look at carbon-based life,

00:13:14.660 | why are we carbon-based?

00:13:15.720 | Well, it turns out it's because of the way

00:13:18.360 | that carbon interacts with elements,

00:13:20.280 | which in fact is also a reflection

00:13:22.340 | on the electronic structure of the carbon nucleus.

00:13:26.800 | So you can look down the table of elements and say,

00:13:28.360 | well, gee, do we see similar elements?

00:13:30.520 | The answer is yes.

00:13:31.600 | And one that one often hears about

00:13:34.320 | in science fiction is silicon.

00:13:36.360 | So maybe there's a silicon-based life form out there

00:13:38.720 | if the conditions are right.

00:13:40.400 | But I think it's presumptuous of us to think

00:13:42.220 | that we are the template by which all life has to appear.

00:13:47.980 | - Before we dive into beautiful details,

00:13:53.060 | let me ask a big question.

00:13:55.380 | What to you is the most beautiful idea,

00:13:58.340 | maybe the most surprising, mysterious idea in physics?

00:14:02.220 | - The most surprising idea to me

00:14:03.660 | is that we can actually do physics.

00:14:05.940 | The universe did not have to be constructed

00:14:09.060 | in such a way that our,

00:14:10.940 | with our limited intellectual capacity,

00:14:13.840 | that is actually put together in such a way

00:14:17.820 | and that we are put together in such a way

00:14:20.420 | that we can, with our mind's eye,

00:14:24.400 | delve incredibly deeply into the structure of the universe.

00:14:27.760 | That to me is pretty close to a miracle.

00:14:30.140 | - So there's simple equations, relatively simple,

00:14:34.620 | that can describe things, the fundamental functions,

00:14:39.620 | that can describe everything about our reality.

00:14:42.800 | That's not, can you imagine universes

00:14:46.280 | where everything is a lot more complicated?

00:14:49.100 | Do you think there's something inherent about universes

00:14:53.720 | that simple laws are--

00:14:57.760 | - Well, first of all, let me,

00:14:59.120 | this is a question that I encounter in a number of guides

00:15:01.680 | is a lot of people will raise the question

00:15:04.480 | about whether mathematics is the language of the universe.

00:15:08.280 | And my response is mathematics is the language

00:15:11.420 | that we humans are capable of using in describing universe.

00:15:14.960 | It may have little to do with the universe,

00:15:17.560 | but in terms of our capacity, it's the microscope,

00:15:20.900 | it's the telescope through which we,

00:15:23.000 | it's the lens through which we are able to view the universe

00:15:26.600 | with the precision that no other human language allows.

00:15:29.860 | So could there be other universes?

00:15:33.120 | Well, I don't even know if this one

00:15:35.600 | looks like I think it does.

00:15:37.040 | - But the beautiful, surprising thing is that

00:15:41.000 | physics, there are laws of physics,

00:15:44.980 | very few laws of physics that can effectively compress

00:15:48.820 | down the functioning of the universe.

00:15:50.380 | - Yes, that's extraordinarily surprising.

00:15:52.820 | I like to use the analogy with computers

00:15:55.100 | and information technology.

00:15:56.940 | If you worry about transmitting large bundles of data,

00:16:01.140 | one of the things that computer scientists do for us

00:16:03.340 | is they allow for processes that are called compression,

00:16:06.500 | where you take big packets of data

00:16:08.060 | and you press them down into much smaller packets

00:16:10.500 | and then you transmit those

00:16:11.620 | and then unpack them at the other end.

00:16:13.540 | And so it looks a little bit to me

00:16:16.160 | like the universe has kind of done us a favor.

00:16:18.680 | It's constructed our minds in such a way

00:16:20.760 | that we have this thing called mathematics,

00:16:23.300 | which then as we look at the universe,

00:16:24.920 | teaches us how to carry out the compression process.

00:16:27.520 | - A quick question about compression.

00:16:31.720 | Do you think the human mind can be compressed?

00:16:35.300 | The biology can be compressed.

00:16:38.220 | We talked about space travel.

00:16:40.180 | To be able to compress the information

00:16:42.620 | that captures some large percent of what it means

00:16:46.140 | to be me or you and then be able to send that

00:16:50.460 | at the speed of light.

00:16:51.620 | - Wow, that's a big question.

00:16:54.420 | And let me try to take it apart,

00:16:57.060 | unpack it into several pieces.

00:16:59.040 | I don't believe that wetware biology such as we are

00:17:02.880 | has an exclusive patent on intellectual consciousness.

00:17:07.880 | I suspect that other structures in the universe

00:17:11.620 | are perfectly capable of producing the data streams

00:17:14.820 | that we use to process, first of all,

00:17:17.380 | our observations of the universe

00:17:19.000 | and an awareness of ourself.

00:17:20.780 | I can imagine other structures can do that also.

00:17:23.420 | So that's part of what you were talking about,

00:17:26.660 | which I would have some disagreement with.

00:17:30.620 | - Consciousness.

00:17:31.660 | - Yes.

00:17:32.500 | - That's the most interesting part of--

00:17:34.400 | - Consciousness?

00:17:35.240 | - Of us humans is consciousness is the thing--

00:17:38.100 | - I think that's the most interesting thing about humans.

00:17:40.020 | - And then you're saying that there's other entities

00:17:43.760 | throughout the universe.

00:17:45.140 | - I can well imagine that the architecture

00:17:48.220 | that supports our consciousness,

00:17:50.300 | again, has no patent on consciousness.

00:17:53.840 | - Just in case you have an interesting thought here,

00:17:57.700 | there's folks perhaps in philosophy called panpsychics

00:18:01.540 | that believe consciousness underlies everything.

00:18:04.140 | It is one of the fundamental laws of the universe.

00:18:07.060 | Do you have a sense that that could possibly fit into--

00:18:09.780 | - I don't know the answer to that question.

00:18:12.020 | One part of that belief system is ghea,

00:18:15.780 | which is that there's a kind of conscious life force

00:18:18.500 | about our planet.

00:18:20.260 | And I've encountered these things before.

00:18:22.820 | I don't quite know what to make of them.

00:18:25.180 | My own life experience, and I'll be 69 in about two months,

00:18:30.340 | and I have spent all my adulthood thinking about

00:18:33.020 | the way that mathematics interacts with nature

00:18:37.420 | and with us to try to understand nature.

00:18:39.780 | And all I can tell you from all of my integrated experience

00:18:43.920 | is that there is something extraordinarily mysterious

00:18:47.380 | to me about our universe.

00:18:48.620 | This is something that Einstein said

00:18:51.140 | from his life experience as a scientist.

00:18:53.740 | And this mysteriousness almost feels

00:18:59.900 | like the universe is our parent.

00:19:03.380 | It's a very strange thing perhaps to hear scientists say,

00:19:07.380 | but there are just so many strange coincidences

00:19:10.180 | that you just get a sense that something is going on.

00:19:13.580 | - Well, I interrupted you in terms of compressing

00:19:18.780 | what we're down to a consented at the speed of light.

00:19:21.900 | - Yes, so the first thing is I would argue

00:19:25.620 | that it's probably very likely

00:19:28.240 | that artificial intelligence ultimately will develop

00:19:31.500 | something like consciousness,

00:19:32.660 | something that for us will probably be indistinguishable

00:19:35.300 | from consciousness.

00:19:36.540 | So that's what I meant by our biological processing equipment

00:19:41.540 | that we carry up here probably does not hold a patent

00:19:44.180 | on consciousness because it's really about the data streams.

00:19:47.420 | I mean, as far as I can tell, that's what we are.

00:19:49.580 | We are self-actuating, self-learning data streams.

00:19:53.780 | That to me is the most accurate way I can tell you

00:19:56.300 | what I've seen in my lifetime about what humans are

00:19:59.740 | at the level of consciousness.

00:20:01.260 | So if that's the case, then you just need to have

00:20:03.580 | an architecture that supports that information processing.

00:20:06.640 | So let's assume that that's true,

00:20:09.060 | that in fact what we call consciousness

00:20:12.620 | is really about a very peculiar kind of data stream.

00:20:17.240 | If that's the case, then if you can export that

00:20:21.420 | to a piece of hardware, something metal,

00:20:25.540 | electronic, what have you, then you certainly will,

00:20:29.500 | ultimately that kind of consciousness

00:20:31.460 | could get to Mars very quickly.

00:20:33.620 | It doesn't have our problems.

00:20:35.060 | You can engineer the body.

00:20:36.420 | As I said, it's a ship or a body,

00:20:37.740 | you engineer one or both.

00:20:38.980 | Send it at a speed of light.

00:20:42.860 | Well, that one is a more difficult one

00:20:46.100 | because that now goes beyond just a matter

00:20:48.740 | of having a data stream.

00:20:49.740 | It's now the preservation of the information

00:20:51.800 | in the data stream.

00:20:53.140 | And so unless you can build something

00:20:55.860 | that's like a super, super, super version

00:20:58.500 | of the way the internet works,

00:20:59.820 | 'cause most people aren't aware that the internet itself

00:21:02.100 | is actually a miracle, it's based on a technology

00:21:04.740 | called message packaging.

00:21:06.340 | So if you could exponentiate message packaging

00:21:10.300 | in some way to preserve the information

00:21:11.940 | that's in the data stream,

00:21:13.180 | then maybe your dream becomes true.

00:21:14.900 | - Can we, you mentioned with artificial intelligence,

00:21:18.940 | sort of us human beings not having

00:21:21.940 | a monopoly on consciousness.

00:21:24.460 | Does the idea of artificial intelligence systems,

00:21:29.460 | computational systems, being able to basically

00:21:34.860 | replacing us humans, scare you, excite you?

00:21:39.280 | What do you think about that?

00:21:40.120 | - So I'm gonna tell you about a conversation

00:21:41.500 | I once had with Eric Schmidt.

00:21:43.500 | I was sitting at a meeting with him

00:21:44.760 | and he was a few feet away.

00:21:47.540 | And he turned to me and he said something like,

00:21:50.260 | you know Jim, in maybe a decade or so,

00:21:52.220 | we're gonna have computers that do what you do.

00:21:54.660 | And my response was not unless they can dream.

00:21:57.220 | Because there's something about the way that we humans

00:22:01.220 | actually generate creativity.

00:22:02.820 | It's somehow, I get this sense of my lived experience

00:22:06.340 | in watching creative people,

00:22:08.020 | that it's somehow connected to the irrational parts

00:22:10.700 | of what goes on in our head.

00:22:12.100 | And dreaming is part of that irrational.

00:22:14.040 | So unless you can build a piece of artificial intelligence

00:22:16.780 | that dreams, I have a strong suspicion

00:22:18.780 | that you will not get something that will fully be conscious

00:22:22.620 | by a definition that I would accept, for example.

00:22:25.820 | - So you mentioned dreaming.

00:22:27.460 | You've played around with some out there fascinating ideas.

00:22:32.380 | How do you think, and we'll start diving into

00:22:36.940 | the world of the very small ideas of supersymmetry

00:22:39.780 | and all that, in terms of visualization,

00:22:43.460 | in terms of how do you think about it,

00:22:45.540 | how do you dream of it, how do you come up with ideas

00:22:48.340 | in that fascinating, mysterious space?

00:22:50.900 | - So in my workspace, which is basically

00:22:54.660 | where I am charged with coming up on a mathematical palette

00:22:59.660 | with new ideas that will help me understand

00:23:03.860 | the structure of nature and hopefully help all of us

00:23:06.120 | understand the structure of nature,

00:23:07.700 | I've observed several different ways

00:23:09.660 | in which my creativity expresses itself.

00:23:12.100 | There's one mode which looks pretty normal,

00:23:14.500 | which I sort of think of as the Chinese water torture method

00:23:18.060 | where you just drop, drop, drop,

00:23:19.620 | you get more and more information,

00:23:21.060 | and suddenly it all congeals and you get a clear picture.

00:23:24.660 | And so that's kind of a standard way of working.

00:23:26.620 | And I think that's how most people think about

00:23:29.060 | the way technical people solve problems,

00:23:32.100 | that it's kind of you accumulate this body of information

00:23:36.180 | and at a certain point you synthesize it

00:23:38.700 | and then boom, there's something new.

00:23:40.620 | But I've also observed in myself and other scientists

00:23:43.260 | that there are other ways that we are creative.

00:23:45.980 | And these other ways to me are actually far more powerful.

00:23:50.700 | I first personally experienced this

00:23:51.980 | when I was a freshman at MIT,

00:23:53.980 | over in Baker House right across the campus.

00:23:56.960 | And I was in a calculus course, 1801 is called at MIT.

00:24:01.960 | And calculus comes in two different flavors.

00:24:05.260 | One of them is called differential calculus.

00:24:07.420 | The other is called integral calculus.

00:24:09.040 | Differential calculus is the calculus

00:24:11.100 | that Newton invented to describe motion.

00:24:14.860 | It turns out integral calculus was probably invented

00:24:16.860 | about 1700 years earlier by Archimedes,

00:24:19.340 | but we didn't know that when I was a freshman.

00:24:21.940 | But so that's what you study as a student.

00:24:25.140 | And the differential calculus part of the course was,

00:24:27.940 | to me, I wouldn't, how do I say this?

00:24:31.260 | It was something that by the drip, drip, drip method

00:24:33.980 | you could sort of figure it out.

00:24:36.340 | Now the integral part of calculus,

00:24:38.580 | I could memorize the formula, that was not the formula,

00:24:41.500 | that was not the problem.

00:24:43.180 | The problem was why, in my own mind,

00:24:45.740 | why do these formulae work?

00:24:49.020 | And because of that, when I was in the part

00:24:53.780 | of the calculus course where we had to do

00:24:55.460 | multiple substitutions to solve integrals,

00:24:57.940 | I had a lot of difficulty.

00:24:59.300 | I was emotionally involved in my education

00:25:02.760 | because this is where I think the passion

00:25:05.500 | and emotion comes to.

00:25:06.940 | And it caused an emotional crisis

00:25:09.100 | that I was having these difficulties

00:25:10.620 | understanding the integral part of calculus.

00:25:12.300 | - The why of it.

00:25:13.140 | - The why, that's right, the why of it.

00:25:14.460 | Not the rote memorization of fact,

00:25:16.580 | but the why of it, why does this work?

00:25:19.500 | And so one night I was over in my dormitory room

00:25:22.820 | in Baker House, I was trying to do a calculus problem set.

00:25:27.100 | I was getting nowhere.

00:25:28.580 | I got a terrific headache.

00:25:32.060 | I went to sleep and had this very strange dream.

00:25:34.860 | And when I awakened, I could do three and four

00:25:38.980 | substitutions and integrals with relative ease.

00:25:42.500 | Now this to me was an astounding experience

00:25:45.460 | because I had never before in my life understood

00:25:49.620 | that one's subconscious is actually capable

00:25:52.020 | of being harnessed to do mathematics.

00:25:54.020 | I experienced this, and I've experienced this

00:25:56.940 | more than once, so this was just the first time

00:25:59.140 | why I remember it so.

00:26:00.760 | So that's why when it comes to really wickedly

00:26:03.860 | tough problems, I think that the kind of creativity

00:26:07.060 | that you need to solve them is probably

00:26:10.340 | this second variety which comes somehow from dreaming.

00:26:14.440 | - Do you think, again, I told you I'm Russian,

00:26:19.340 | so we romanticize suffering, but do you think

00:26:21.820 | part of that equation is the suffering

00:26:24.140 | leading up to that dreaming?

00:26:26.660 | - So the suffering is, I am convinced

00:26:30.460 | that this kind of creative, this second mode

00:26:33.380 | of creativity as I like to call it,

00:26:35.500 | I'm convinced that this second mode of creativity

00:26:38.340 | is in fact that suffering is a kind of crucible

00:26:43.340 | that triggers it because the mind I think

00:26:46.540 | is struggling to get out of this,

00:26:48.340 | and the only way to get out of this

00:26:50.220 | is to actually solve the problem.

00:26:51.980 | And even though you're not consciously solving problems,

00:26:54.780 | something is going on, and I've talked about,

00:26:57.180 | to a few other people, and I've heard

00:26:58.660 | other similar stories, and so I guess the way

00:27:03.020 | I think about it is it's a little bit like

00:27:05.220 | the way that thermonuclear weapons work.

00:27:08.060 | I don't know if you know how they work,

00:27:09.580 | but a thermonuclear weapon is actually two bombs.

00:27:11.940 | There's an atomic bomb which sort of does a compression,

00:27:14.540 | and then you have a fusion bomb that goes off,

00:27:16.260 | and somehow that emotional pressure I think

00:27:19.540 | acts like the first stage of a thermonuclear weapon.

00:27:22.260 | That's when we get really big thoughts.

00:27:24.340 | - The analogy between thermonuclear weapons

00:27:27.740 | and the subconscious, the connection there is,

00:27:32.580 | at least visually, is kind of interesting.

00:27:35.700 | There may be, Freud would have a few things to say.

00:27:40.940 | - Well, part of it is probably based

00:27:42.580 | on my own trajectory through life.

00:27:44.420 | My father was in the US Army for 27 years,

00:27:47.980 | and so I started my life out on military basis,

00:27:51.660 | and so a lot of probably the things

00:27:54.060 | that wander around in my subconscious

00:27:55.860 | are connected to that experience.

00:27:57.580 | - I apologize for all the tangents, but--

00:27:59.900 | - Well, you're doing it.

00:28:01.980 | (laughing)

00:28:04.220 | - But you're encouraging by answering the stupid questions.

00:28:07.660 | - No, they're not stupid.

00:28:08.860 | - You know, your father was in the Army.

00:28:12.380 | What do you think about, Neil deGrasse Tyson

00:28:19.300 | recently wrote a book on interlinking

00:28:22.060 | the progress of science to sort of

00:28:28.580 | the aspirations of our military endeavors

00:28:31.900 | and DARPA funding and so on.

00:28:34.100 | What do you think about war in general?

00:28:36.020 | Do you think we'll always have war?

00:28:38.100 | Do you think we'll always have conflict in the world?

00:28:42.140 | - I'm not sure that we're going to be able

00:28:43.820 | to afford to have war always, because if--

00:28:47.620 | - Strictly financially speaking?

00:28:49.220 | - No, not in terms of finance, but in terms of consequences.

00:28:53.380 | So if you look at technology today,

00:28:57.100 | you can have non-state actors acquire technology,

00:29:00.580 | for example, bioterrorism, whose impact

00:29:04.260 | is roughly speaking equivalent to what it used

00:29:06.860 | to take nations to impart on a population.

00:29:10.740 | I think the cost of war is ultimately,

00:29:13.420 | it's going to be a little, I think it's going to work

00:29:14.900 | a little bit like the Cold War.

00:29:16.820 | You know, we survived 50, 60 years as a species

00:29:21.740 | with these weapons that are so terrible

00:29:24.820 | that they could have actually ended

00:29:26.300 | our form of life on this planet, but it didn't.

00:29:28.980 | Why didn't it?

00:29:30.140 | Well, it's a very bizarre and interesting thing,

00:29:32.060 | but it was called mutually assured destruction.

00:29:34.460 | And so the cost was so great that people eventually

00:29:37.460 | figured out that you can't really use these things,

00:29:40.500 | which is kind of interesting, 'cause if you read

00:29:42.100 | the history about the development of nuclear weapons,

00:29:44.620 | physicists actually realized this pretty quickly.

00:29:46.660 | I think it was maybe Schrodinger who said

00:29:49.340 | that these things are not really weapons,

00:29:51.340 | they're political implements, they're not weapons,

00:29:53.740 | because the cost is so high.

00:29:55.980 | And if you take that example and spread it out

00:30:00.300 | to the kind of technological development we're seeing now

00:30:02.580 | outside of nuclear physics, but I picked the example

00:30:05.540 | of biology, I could well imagine that there would be

00:30:09.580 | material science sorts of equivalents,

00:30:11.580 | that across a broad front of technology,

00:30:14.540 | you take that experience from nuclear weapons,

00:30:17.140 | and the picture that I see is that it would be so,

00:30:20.100 | it would be possible to develop technologies

00:30:22.220 | that are so terrible that you couldn't use them,

00:30:25.340 | because the costs are too high.

00:30:27.580 | And that might cure us.

00:30:29.100 | - And many people have argued that actually it prevented,

00:30:33.140 | nuclear weapons have prevented more military conflict than--

00:30:36.740 | - It certainly froze the conflict domain.

00:30:41.100 | It's interesting that nowadays, it was with the removal

00:30:45.060 | of the threat of mutually assured destruction

00:30:48.060 | that other forces took over in our geopolitics.

00:30:52.220 | Do you have worries of existential threats

00:30:57.220 | of nuclear weapons or other technologies

00:31:00.180 | like artificial intelligence?

00:31:01.660 | Do you think we humans will tend to figure out

00:31:05.020 | how to not blow ourselves up?

00:31:06.900 | - I don't know, quite frankly.

00:31:08.420 | This is something I've thought about.

00:31:11.820 | And I'm not, I mean, so I'm a spectator in the sense

00:31:16.820 | that as a scientist, I collect and collate data.

00:31:21.700 | So I've been doing that all my life

00:31:23.340 | and looking at my species.

00:31:25.300 | And it's not clear to me that we are going to avoid

00:31:29.060 | a catastrophic self-induced ending.

00:31:31.620 | - Are you optimistic?

00:31:35.660 | Not as a scientist, but as a single--

00:31:40.020 | - I would say I wouldn't bet against us.

00:31:43.620 | - Beautifully put.

00:31:47.140 | Let's dive into the world of the very small,

00:31:50.700 | if we could for a bit.

00:31:52.900 | What are the basic particles,

00:31:55.380 | either experimentally observed

00:31:56.940 | or hypothesized by physicists?

00:31:59.380 | - So as we physicists look at the universe,

00:32:02.540 | you can, first of all, there are two big buckets

00:32:04.540 | of particles, that is the smallest objects

00:32:06.940 | that we are able to currently mathematically conceive

00:32:11.340 | and then experimentally verify that these ideas

00:32:15.020 | have a sense of accuracy to them.

00:32:17.780 | So one of those buckets we call matter.

00:32:20.980 | These are things like electrons,

00:32:23.060 | things that are like quarks,

00:32:25.020 | which are particles that exist inside of protons.

00:32:27.900 | And there's a whole family of these things.

00:32:30.780 | There are in fact 18 quarks

00:32:32.860 | and apparently six electron-like objects

00:32:35.460 | that we call leptons.

00:32:37.460 | So that's one bucket.

00:32:39.100 | The other bucket that we see both in our mathematics

00:32:41.740 | as well as in our experimental equipment

00:32:43.700 | are what are a set of particles

00:32:45.820 | that you can call force carriers.

00:32:47.900 | The most familiar force carrier is the photon,

00:32:50.300 | the particle of light that allows you to see me.

00:32:52.220 | In fact, it's the same object

00:32:53.700 | that carries electric repulsion between like charges.

00:32:58.340 | From science fiction, we have the object

00:33:01.020 | called the graviton, which is talked about a lot

00:33:03.140 | in science fiction and Star Trek.

00:33:05.420 | But the graviton is also a mathematical object

00:33:07.580 | that we physicists have known about

00:33:08.980 | essentially since Einstein wrote

00:33:10.540 | his theory of general relativity.

00:33:13.420 | There are four forces in nature, the fundamental forces.

00:33:17.700 | There is the gravitational force,

00:33:19.580 | its carrier is the graviton.

00:33:21.660 | There are three other forces in nature,

00:33:23.180 | the electromagnetic force, the strong nuclear force,

00:33:25.820 | and the weak nuclear force.

00:33:27.020 | And each one of these forces has one or more carriers.

00:33:30.220 | The photon is the carrier of the electromagnetic force.

00:33:33.260 | The strong nuclear force actually has eight carriers,

00:33:35.980 | they're called gluons.

00:33:37.260 | And then the weak nuclear force has three carriers,

00:33:39.620 | they're called the W plus, W minus, and Z bosons.

00:33:44.060 | So those are the things that both in mathematics

00:33:46.540 | and in experiments, by the way,

00:33:48.780 | the most precise experiments we're ever,

00:33:51.060 | as a species, able to conduct,

00:33:53.140 | is about measuring the accuracy of these ideas.

00:33:55.660 | And we know that at least to one part in a billion,

00:33:57.660 | these ideas are right.

00:33:59.620 | - So first of all, you've made it sound

00:34:03.540 | both elegant and simple, but is it crazy to you

00:34:08.780 | that there is force carriers?

00:34:11.300 | Like is that supposed to be a trivial idea to think about?

00:34:14.460 | If we think about photons, gluons,

00:34:17.300 | that there's four fundamental forces of physics,

00:34:21.300 | and then those forces are expressed,

00:34:24.220 | there's carriers of those forces.

00:34:26.540 | Like is that a kind of trivial thing?

00:34:29.580 | - It's not a trivial thing at all.

00:34:31.020 | In fact, it was a puzzle for Sir Isaac Newton,

00:34:33.180 | because he's the first person to give us basically physics.

00:34:37.180 | Before Isaac Newton, physics didn't exist.

00:34:39.780 | What did exist was called natural philosophy.

00:34:41.740 | So discussions about using the methods

00:34:43.860 | of classical philosophy to understand nature,

00:34:46.380 | natural philosophy.

00:34:47.380 | So the Greeks, we call them scientists,

00:34:50.740 | but they were natural philosophers.

00:34:52.860 | Physics doesn't get born until Newton writes the Principia.

00:34:56.620 | One of the things that puzzled him was how gravity works,

00:35:00.500 | because if you read very carefully what he writes,

00:35:04.860 | he basically says, and I'm paraphrasing badly,

00:35:07.340 | but he basically says that someone who thinks deeply

00:35:10.020 | about this subject would find it inconceivable

00:35:13.220 | that an object in one place or location

00:35:17.020 | can magically reach out and affect another object

00:35:19.560 | with nothing intervening.

00:35:21.620 | And so it puzzled him.

00:35:23.060 | - Does it puzzle you?

00:35:24.460 | - Well, it doesn't-- - Action at a distance.

00:35:25.700 | I mean, not as a physicist.

00:35:26.980 | - It would, it would, except that I am a physicist,

00:35:29.940 | and we have long ago resolved this issue,

00:35:32.420 | and the resolution came about

00:35:33.540 | through a second great physicist.

00:35:36.860 | Most people have heard of Newton.

00:35:38.460 | Most people have heard of Einstein.

00:35:40.140 | But between the two of them,

00:35:41.100 | there was another extraordinarily great physicist,

00:35:43.660 | a man named James Clark Maxwell.

00:35:45.940 | And Maxwell, between these two other giants,

00:35:49.500 | taught us about electric and magnetic forces,

00:35:52.940 | and it's from his equations that one can figure out

00:35:55.940 | that there's a carrier called the photon.

00:35:58.260 | So this was resolved for physicists around 1860 or so.

00:36:02.880 | - So what are bosons and fermions and hadrons?

00:36:07.780 | - Sure. - Elementary and composite.

00:36:09.700 | - Sure, so earlier I said-- - Two buckets.

00:36:13.660 | - You've got two buckets

00:36:14.580 | if you wanna try to build a universe.

00:36:15.820 | You gotta start off with things on these two buckets.

00:36:18.700 | So you gotta have things, that's the matter,

00:36:21.260 | and then you have to have other objects that act on them

00:36:23.780 | to cause those things to cohere to fixed finite patterns,

00:36:28.420 | because you need those fixed finite patterns

00:36:30.020 | as building blocks.

00:36:31.100 | So that's the way our universe looks to people like me.

00:36:33.980 | Now, the building blocks do different things.

00:36:37.100 | So let's go back to these two buckets again.

00:36:39.820 | Let me start with a bucket containing the particle of light.

00:36:42.780 | Let me imagine I'm in a dusty room with two flashlights,

00:36:46.380 | and I have one flashlight,

00:36:47.780 | which I direct directly in front of me,

00:36:50.300 | and then I have you stand over to, say, my left,

00:36:52.780 | and then we both take our flashlights and turn them on

00:36:54.740 | and make sure the beams go right through each other.

00:36:56.740 | And the beams do just that, they go right through each other.

00:36:58.660 | They don't bounce off of each other.

00:37:00.260 | The reason the room has to be dusty

00:37:01.460 | is because we wanna see the light.

00:37:03.420 | The room dust wasn't there,

00:37:04.420 | we wouldn't actually see the light

00:37:05.460 | until it got to the other wall, right?

00:37:06.980 | So you see the beam 'cause it's dust in the air.

00:37:09.860 | But the two beams actually pass right through each other.

00:37:12.580 | They literally pass right through.

00:37:13.900 | They don't affect each other at all.

00:37:15.860 | One acts like the other, it's not there.

00:37:20.180 | The particle of light is the simplest example

00:37:22.980 | that shows that behavior.

00:37:24.540 | That's a boson.

00:37:26.140 | Now let's imagine that I have to,

00:37:28.220 | we're in the same dusty room,

00:37:30.020 | and this time you have a bucket of balls

00:37:31.820 | and I have a bucket of balls.

00:37:33.020 | And we try to throw them so that we get something

00:37:36.140 | like a beam, throwing them fast, right?

00:37:38.280 | If they collide, they don't just pass through each other,

00:37:41.420 | they bounce off of each other.

00:37:43.340 | Now, that's mostly because they have electric charge,

00:37:45.820 | and electric charges, light charges, repel.

00:37:48.500 | But mathematically, I know how to turn off

00:37:50.260 | the electric charge.

00:37:51.460 | If you do that, you'll find they still repel.

00:37:53.780 | And it's because they are these things we call fermions.

00:37:57.100 | So this is how you distinguish the things

00:37:58.980 | that are in the two buckets.

00:38:00.140 | They are either bosons or fermions.

00:38:02.220 | - Which of them, and maybe you can mention

00:38:06.980 | the most popular of the bosons.

00:38:09.900 | - The most recently discovered.

00:38:12.020 | It's like-- - The Higgs boson.

00:38:13.700 | - Yeah, yeah, it's like when I was in high school

00:38:15.180 | and there was a really popular majorette,

00:38:18.260 | her name is the Higgs particle these days.

00:38:21.500 | - Can you describe which of the bosons and the fermions

00:38:26.500 | have been discovered, hypothesized,

00:38:29.460 | which have been experimentally validated,

00:38:31.100 | what's still out there? - Sure, right.

00:38:32.540 | So the two buckets that I've actually described to you

00:38:37.380 | have all been first hypothesized

00:38:40.140 | and then verified by observation,

00:38:43.060 | with the Higgs boson being the most recent

00:38:45.220 | one of these things.

00:38:47.180 | We haven't actually verified the graviton

00:38:49.780 | interestingly enough.

00:38:50.660 | We mathematically, we have an expectation

00:38:54.060 | that graviton's like this,

00:38:55.340 | but we've not performed an experiment

00:38:56.860 | to show that this is an accurate idea that nature uses.

00:38:59.900 | - So something has to be a carrier

00:39:01.980 | of force of gravity. - For the force of gravity,

00:39:03.220 | exactly.

00:39:04.460 | Because that's-- - Can it be something

00:39:05.460 | way more mysterious than we,

00:39:07.940 | so when you say the graviton,

00:39:09.460 | would it be like the other particles,

00:39:14.140 | force carriers, or can it be something

00:39:15.700 | much more mysterious? - In some ways, yes,

00:39:16.940 | but in other ways, no.

00:39:18.660 | It turns out that the graviton is also,

00:39:21.820 | if you look at Einstein's theory,

00:39:24.100 | he taught us about this thing he calls space-time,

00:39:26.500 | which is, if you try to imagine it,

00:39:29.260 | you can sort of think of it as kind of a rubber surface.

00:39:32.380 | That's one popular depiction of space-time.

00:39:34.860 | It's not an accurate depiction

00:39:36.180 | because the only accuracy is actually

00:39:37.740 | in the calculus that he uses,

00:39:39.220 | but that's close enough.

00:39:41.100 | So if you have a sheet of rubber, you can wave it.

00:39:43.740 | You can actually form a wave on it.

00:39:46.020 | Space-time is enough like that

00:39:47.780 | so that when space-time oscillates,

00:39:49.900 | you create these waves.

00:39:50.980 | These waves carry energy.

00:39:53.060 | We expect them to carry energy in quanta.

00:39:55.020 | That's what a graviton is.

00:39:56.100 | It's a wave in space-time.

00:39:57.780 | And so the fact that we have seen the waves

00:40:00.700 | with LIGO over the course of the last three years,

00:40:03.660 | and we've recently used gravitational wave observatories

00:40:07.140 | to watch colliding black holes and neutron stars

00:40:09.700 | and all sorts of really cool stuff out there.

00:40:12.420 | So we know the waves exist,

00:40:14.500 | but in order to know that gravitons exist,

00:40:16.660 | you have to prove that these waves carry energy

00:40:18.700 | in energy packets,

00:40:20.300 | and that's what we don't have the technology to do yet.

00:40:23.300 | - And perhaps briefly jumping to a philosophical question,

00:40:28.260 | does it make sense to you that gravity

00:40:30.520 | is so much weaker than the other forces?

00:40:32.860 | - No.

00:40:33.700 | You see, now you've touched on a very deep mystery

00:40:40.460 | about physics.

00:40:41.620 | There are a lot of such questions of physics

00:40:44.220 | about why things are as they are.

00:40:47.140 | And as someone who believes that there are some things

00:40:50.900 | that certainly are coincidences,

00:40:53.380 | like you could ask the same question about,

00:40:54.820 | well, why are the planets at the orbits

00:40:57.100 | that they are around the sun?

00:40:58.900 | The answer turns out there is no good reason.

00:41:00.260 | It's just an accident.

00:41:01.420 | So there are things in nature that have that character,

00:41:03.500 | and perhaps the strength of the various forces is like that.

00:41:08.500 | On the other hand, we don't know that that's the case,

00:41:10.900 | and there may be some deep reasons

00:41:12.540 | about why the forces are ordered as they are,

00:41:15.940 | where the weakest force is gravity,

00:41:17.640 | the next weakest force is the weak interaction,

00:41:19.720 | the weak nuclear force,

00:41:20.980 | then there's electromagnetism, there's a strong force.

00:41:23.100 | We don't really have a good understanding

00:41:24.700 | of why this is the ordering of the forces.

00:41:27.040 | - Some of the fascinating work you've done

00:41:30.900 | is in the space of supersymmetry, symmetry in general.

00:41:35.900 | Can you describe, first of all, what is supersymmetry?

00:41:39.220 | - Ah, yes.

00:41:40.460 | So you remember the two buckets I told you about,

00:41:42.420 | perhaps earlier, I said there are two buckets

00:41:44.740 | in our universe.

00:41:46.060 | So now I want you to think about drawing a pie

00:41:51.060 | that has four quadrants.

00:41:53.020 | So I want you to cut the piece of pie in fourths.

00:41:56.140 | So in one quadrant, I'm gonna put all the buckets

00:41:58.220 | that we talked about that are like the electron and quarks.

00:42:01.340 | In a different quadrant,

00:42:02.340 | I am going to put all the force carriers.

00:42:04.500 | The other two quadrants are empty.

00:42:06.580 | Now, if you, I showed you a picture of that,

00:42:08.500 | you'd see a circle.

00:42:10.060 | There would be a bunch of stuff in one upper quadrant

00:42:12.540 | and stuff in others.

00:42:13.900 | And then I would ask you a question.

00:42:15.900 | Does that look symmetrical to you?

00:42:17.600 | - No.

00:42:19.900 | - No.

00:42:20.720 | And that's exactly right,

00:42:22.100 | because we humans actually have a very deeply programmed

00:42:26.660 | sense of symmetry.

00:42:28.340 | It's something that is part of that mystery

00:42:30.780 | of the universe.

00:42:32.940 | So how would you make it symmetrical?

00:42:34.420 | One way you could is by saying those two empty quadrants

00:42:36.980 | had things in them also.

00:42:38.960 | And if you do that, that's supersymmetry.

00:42:42.520 | So that's what I understood when I was a graduate student

00:42:45.060 | here at MIT in 1975,

00:42:47.900 | when the mathematics of this was first being born.

00:42:51.240 | Supersymmetry was actually born in the Ukraine

00:42:55.060 | in the late '60s,

00:42:55.900 | but we had this thing called the Iron Curtain,

00:42:57.620 | so we Westerners didn't know about it.

00:43:00.540 | But by the early '70s, independently,

00:43:02.900 | there were scientists in the West

00:43:04.300 | who had rediscovered supersymmetry.

00:43:07.460 | Bruno Zemino and Julius Vest were their names.

00:43:10.440 | So this was around '71 or '72 when this happened.

00:43:14.180 | I started graduate school in '73,

00:43:16.240 | so around '74, '75, I was trying to figure out

00:43:19.240 | how to write a thesis so that I could become a physicist

00:43:21.520 | the rest of my life.

00:43:22.620 | I did a, I had a great advisor, Professor James Young,

00:43:27.720 | who had taught me a number of things about electrons

00:43:31.160 | and weak forces and those sorts of things.

00:43:34.000 | But I decided that if I was going to have a really,

00:43:39.000 | an opportunity to maximize my chances of being successful,

00:43:45.540 | I should strike it out in a direction

00:43:46.940 | that other people were not studying.

00:43:48.780 | And so as a consequence, I surveyed ideas

00:43:52.260 | that were going, that were being developed,

00:43:54.380 | and I came across the idea of supersymmetry.

00:43:57.100 | And it was so, the mathematics was so remarkable

00:44:00.740 | that I just, it bowled me over.

00:44:03.140 | I actually have two undergraduate degrees.

00:44:05.460 | My first undergraduate degree is actually mathematics,

00:44:07.540 | and my second is physics,

00:44:09.420 | even though I always wanted to be a physicist.

00:44:12.040 | Plan A, which involved getting good grades, was mathematics.

00:44:17.500 | I was a mathematics major thinking about graduate school,

00:44:20.500 | but my heart was in physics.

00:44:22.820 | - If we could take a small digression,

00:44:26.240 | what's to you the most beautiful idea in mathematics

00:44:29.080 | that you've encountered in this interplay

00:44:31.560 | between math and physics?

00:44:33.420 | - It's the idea of symmetry.

00:44:35.500 | The fact that our innate sense of symmetry

00:44:40.220 | winds up aligning with just incredible mathematics,

00:44:44.540 | to me, is the most beautiful thing.

00:44:47.420 | It's very strange, but true,

00:44:50.140 | that if symmetries were perfect, we would not exist.

00:44:53.140 | And so even though we have these very powerful ideas

00:44:55.260 | about balance in the universe in some sense,

00:44:57.720 | it's only when you break those balances

00:44:59.220 | that you get creatures like humans,

00:45:01.540 | objects like planets and stars.

00:45:03.640 | So although they are a scaffold for reality,

00:45:07.120 | they cannot be the entirety of reality.

00:45:09.560 | So I'm kind of naturally attracted to parts of science

00:45:14.560 | and technology where symmetry plays a dominant role.

00:45:21.460 | - And not just, I guess, symmetry, as you said,

00:45:23.540 | but the magic happens when you break the symmetry.

00:45:26.880 | - The magic happens when you break the symmetry.

00:45:29.620 | - Okay, so diving right back in,

00:45:31.300 | you mentioned four quadrants.

00:45:33.140 | - Yes.

00:45:34.100 | - Two are filled with stuff, two buckets.

00:45:36.940 | - Yep.

00:45:37.780 | - And then there's crazy mathematical thing,

00:45:39.500 | ideas for filling the other two.

00:45:40.980 | - The other two.

00:45:41.820 | - What are those things?

00:45:43.380 | - So earlier, the way I described these two buckets

00:45:46.260 | is I gave you a story that started out

00:45:48.960 | by putting us in a dusty room with two flashlights.

00:45:52.740 | And I said, "Turn on your flashlight, I'll turn on mine,

00:45:55.300 | "the beams will go through each other."

00:45:56.940 | And the beams are composed of force carriers called photons.

00:46:01.020 | They carry the electromagnetic force.

00:46:03.300 | And they pass right through each other.

00:46:04.420 | So imagine looking at the mathematics of such an object,

00:46:07.660 | which you don't have to imagine people like me do that.

00:46:10.460 | So you take that mathematics,

00:46:12.860 | and then you ask yourself a question.

00:46:15.260 | You see, mathematics is a palette.

00:46:16.740 | It's just like a musical composer

00:46:20.740 | is able to construct variations on a theme.

00:46:24.500 | Well, a piece of mathematics in the hand of a physicist

00:46:26.860 | is something that we can construct variations on.

00:46:29.100 | So even though the mathematics that Maxwell gave us

00:46:33.340 | about light, we know how to construct variations on that.

00:46:38.220 | And one of the variations you can construct is to say,

00:46:41.180 | suppose you have a force carrier for electromagnetism

00:46:44.740 | that behaves like an electron

00:46:47.060 | in that it would bounce off of another one.

00:46:49.340 | That's changing a mathematical term in an equation.

00:46:53.260 | So if you did that, you would have a force carrier.

00:46:56.700 | So you would say, first,

00:46:57.940 | it belongs in this force-carrying bucket.

00:46:59.700 | But it's got this property of bouncing off like electrons.

00:47:01.780 | So you say, "Well, gee, wait, no,

00:47:03.340 | "that's not the right bucket."

00:47:04.580 | So you're forced to actually put it

00:47:05.740 | in one of these empty quadrants.

00:47:07.780 | So those sorts of things, basically, we give them a,

00:47:12.060 | so the photon mathematically can be accompanied by a photino.

00:47:15.900 | It's the thing that carries a force,

00:47:18.180 | but has the rule of bouncing off.

00:47:20.660 | In a similar manner, you could start with an electron.

00:47:24.220 | And you say, "Okay, so write down

00:47:25.620 | "the mathematics of an electron."

00:47:27.020 | I know how to do that.

00:47:28.220 | A physicist named Dirac first told us how to do that

00:47:30.180 | back in the late '20s, early '30s.

00:47:33.500 | So take that mathematics, and then you say,

00:47:35.180 | "Let me look at that mathematics

00:47:37.560 | "and find out what in the mathematics

00:47:39.480 | "causes two electrons to bounce off of each other,

00:47:42.140 | "even if I turn off the electrical charge."

00:47:44.500 | So I could do that.

00:47:45.580 | And now let me change that mathematical term.

00:47:48.220 | So now I have something that carries electrical charge,

00:47:50.700 | but if you take two of them,

00:47:52.300 | I'm sorry, if you turn their charges off,

00:47:53.700 | they'll pass through each other.

00:47:55.340 | So that puts things in the other quadrant.

00:47:57.660 | And those things we tend to call,

00:47:59.680 | we put the S in front of their name.

00:48:02.540 | So in the lower quadrant here, we have electrons.

00:48:04.820 | In this now newly filled quadrant, we have selectrons.

00:48:08.180 | In the quadrant over here, we had quarks.

00:48:12.300 | Over here, we have squarks.

00:48:13.740 | So now we've got this balanced pie.

00:48:15.580 | And that's basically what I understood

00:48:17.540 | as a graduate student in 1975

00:48:20.460 | about this idea of supersymmetry,

00:48:22.400 | that it was going to fill up these two quadrants

00:48:24.340 | of the pie in a way that no one

00:48:25.900 | had ever thought about before.

00:48:27.740 | So I was amazed that no one else at MIT

00:48:30.180 | found this an interesting idea.

00:48:32.340 | So it led to my becoming the first person in MIT

00:48:37.260 | to really study supersymmetry.

00:48:39.500 | This is 1975, '76, '77.

00:48:42.620 | And in '77, I wrote the first PhD thesis

00:48:44.860 | in the physics department on this idea

00:48:47.100 | because I was drawn to the balance.

00:48:49.620 | - Drawn to the symmetry.

00:48:51.580 | So what does that, first of all,

00:48:56.580 | is this fundamentally a mathematical idea?

00:49:01.260 | So how much experimental, and we'll have this theme,

00:49:04.420 | it's a really interesting one.

00:49:05.620 | When you explore the world of the small

00:49:08.220 | and in your new book talking about

00:49:11.300 | approving Einstein, right, that we'll also talk about,

00:49:14.140 | there's this theme of kind of starting at,

00:49:16.700 | exploring crazy ideas first in the mathematics

00:49:19.660 | and then seeking for ways to experimentally validate them.

00:49:22.980 | Where do you put supersymmetry in that?

00:49:25.660 | - It's closer than string theory.

00:49:28.340 | It has not yet been validated.

00:49:30.820 | In some sense, you mentioned Einstein,

00:49:33.280 | so let's go there for a moment.

00:49:35.500 | In our book, Proving Einstein Right,

00:49:37.140 | we actually do talk about the fact

00:49:38.940 | that Albert Einstein in 1915 wrote a set of equations

00:49:43.060 | which were very different from Newton's equations

00:49:45.260 | in describing gravity.

00:49:46.940 | These equations made some predictions

00:49:49.060 | that were different from Newton's predictions.

00:49:51.380 | It actually made three different predictions.

00:49:53.220 | One of them was not actually a prediction

00:49:55.180 | but a postdiction because it was known

00:49:57.140 | that Mercury was not orbiting the sun

00:49:59.620 | in the way that Newton would have told you.

00:50:01.740 | And so Einstein's theory actually describes Mercury

00:50:05.500 | orbiting in a way that it was observed

00:50:08.340 | as opposed to what Newton would have told you.

00:50:09.940 | So that was one prediction.

00:50:11.740 | The second prediction that came out

00:50:13.380 | of the theory of general relativity,

00:50:14.780 | which Einstein wrote in 1915,

00:50:17.500 | was that if you,

00:50:20.460 | so let me describe an experiment and come back to it.

00:50:24.660 | Suppose I had a glass of water

00:50:26.740 | and I filled the glass up

00:50:30.180 | and then I moved the glass slowly back and forth

00:50:32.300 | between our two faces.

00:50:34.060 | It would appear to me like your face was moving,

00:50:37.820 | even though you weren't moving.

00:50:39.060 | I mean, it's actually, and what's causing it

00:50:41.260 | is because the light gets bent through the glass

00:50:43.620 | as it passes from your face to my eye.

00:50:46.380 | So Einstein, in his 1915 theory of general relativity,

00:50:51.380 | found out that gravity has the same effect on light

00:50:55.460 | as that glass of water.

00:50:56.500 | It would cause beams of light to bend.

00:50:59.260 | Now, Newton also knew this,

00:51:02.020 | but Einstein's prediction was

00:51:03.380 | that light would bend twice as much.

00:51:05.780 | And so here's a mathematical idea.

00:51:08.300 | Now, how do you actually prove it?

00:51:09.980 | - Well, you've got to watch, yeah.

00:51:12.740 | - Just a quick pause on that,

00:51:14.180 | just the language you're using.

00:51:15.740 | He found out--

00:51:17.860 | - I can say he did a calculation.

00:51:19.620 | - It's a really interesting notion

00:51:21.220 | that one of the beautiful things about this universe

00:51:25.180 | is you can do a calculation

00:51:27.980 | and combine with some of that magical intuition

00:51:30.940 | that physicists have,

00:51:32.340 | actually predict what would be,

00:51:35.260 | what's possible to experiment to validate.

00:51:37.620 | - That's correct.

00:51:38.460 | - And he found out in the sense that

00:51:40.500 | there seems to be something here

00:51:43.300 | and mathematically it should bend,

00:51:46.020 | gravity should bend light this amount.

00:51:48.540 | And so therefore that's something that could be potentially,

00:51:51.380 | and then come up with an experiment that could be validated.

00:51:53.340 | - Right.

00:51:54.420 | And that's the way that actually modern physics,

00:51:57.340 | deeply fundamental modern physics,

00:51:59.900 | this is how it works.

00:52:00.980 | Earlier we spoke about the Higgs boson.

00:52:04.460 | So why did we go looking for it?

00:52:07.180 | The answer is that back in the late '60s, early '70s,

00:52:11.980 | some people wrote some equations

00:52:13.860 | and the equations predicted this.

00:52:16.620 | So then we went looking for it.

00:52:18.180 | - So on supersymmetry for a second,

00:52:22.320 | there's these things called Dinkers symbols,

00:52:26.340 | these strange little graphs.

00:52:27.620 | - Yes.

00:52:28.460 | - You refer to them as revealing something like binary code.

00:52:31.700 | - Yes.

00:52:32.540 | - Underlying reality.

00:52:33.740 | - Yes.

00:52:34.580 | - First of all, can you describe these graphs?

00:52:35.940 | What are they?

00:52:36.780 | What are these beautiful little strange graphs?

00:52:40.740 | - Well, first of all, the Dinkers are an invention of mine,

00:52:44.860 | together with a colleague named Michael Fox.

00:52:46.940 | In 2005, we were looking at equations.

00:52:50.060 | Well, the story's a little bit more complicated

00:52:51.820 | and it'll take too long to explain all the details,

00:52:54.080 | but the Reader's Digest version is that we were looking

00:52:56.380 | at these equations and we figured out that all the data

00:53:01.180 | in a certain class of equations could be put in pictures.

00:53:04.660 | And the pictures, what do they look like?

00:53:06.460 | Well, they're just little balls.

00:53:09.380 | You have black balls and white balls.

00:53:12.100 | Those stand for those two buckets, by the way,

00:53:14.140 | that we talked about in reality.

00:53:15.740 | The white balls are things that are like particles of light.

00:53:18.600 | The black balls are like electrons.

00:53:20.800 | And then you can draw lines connecting these balls.

00:53:24.460 | And these lines are deeply mathematical objects

00:53:27.460 | and there's no way for me to,

00:53:29.100 | I have no physical model for telling you what the lines are.

00:53:33.900 | But if you were a mathematician,

00:53:36.260 | I would do a technical phrase saying,

00:53:37.980 | this is the orbit of the representation

00:53:39.620 | and the action of the symmetry generators.

00:53:41.900 | Mathematicians wouldn't understand that.

00:53:43.660 | Nobody else in their right mind would,

00:53:45.140 | so let's not go there.

00:53:46.240 | But we figured out that the data that was in the equations

00:53:50.980 | was in these funny pictures that we could draw.

00:53:53.820 | And so that was stunning,

00:53:55.480 | but it also was encouraging

00:53:59.720 | because there are problems with the equations,

00:54:02.480 | which I had first learned about in 1979

00:54:06.800 | when I was down at Harvard.

00:54:08.000 | I went out to Caltech for the first time

00:54:09.940 | and working with a great scientist

00:54:11.760 | by the name of John Schwarz.

00:54:12.780 | There are problems in the equations we don't know how to solve.

00:54:16.080 | And so one of the things about solving problems

00:54:18.380 | that you don't know how to solve

00:54:20.200 | is that beating your head against a brick wall

00:54:22.880 | is probably not a good philosophy about how to solve it.

00:54:25.940 | So what do you need to do?

00:54:26.840 | You need to change your sense of reference,

00:54:29.320 | your frame of reference, your perspective.

00:54:31.400 | So when I saw these funny pictures,

00:54:35.160 | I thought, "Gee, that might be a way

00:54:37.520 | to solve these problems with equations

00:54:39.100 | that we don't know how to do."

00:54:41.880 | So that was for me one of the first attractions

00:54:44.440 | is that I now had an alternative language

00:54:47.000 | to try to attack a set of mathematical problems.

00:54:49.860 | But I quickly realized that A,

00:54:54.640 | this mathematical language was not known by mathematicians,

00:54:58.140 | which makes it pretty interesting

00:54:59.920 | because now you have to actually teach mathematicians

00:55:02.760 | about a piece of mathematics

00:55:04.120 | because that's how they make their living.

00:55:06.000 | And the great thing about working with mathematicians,

00:55:08.040 | of course, is the rigor with which they examine ideas.

00:55:11.080 | So they make your ideas better than they start out.

00:55:14.480 | So I started working with a group of mathematicians

00:55:16.680 | and it was in that collaboration that we figured out

00:55:18.540 | that these funny pictures

00:55:19.380 | had error correcting codes buried in them.

00:55:21.480 | So--

00:55:23.720 | - Can you talk about what are error correcting codes?

00:55:25.880 | - Sure.

00:55:26.720 | So the simplest way to talk about error correcting codes

00:55:30.880 | is first of all, to talk about digital information.

00:55:36.840 | Digital information is basically strings of ones and zeros.

00:55:39.640 | They're called bits.

00:55:41.120 | So now let's imagine that I want to send you some bits.

00:55:45.760 | Well, maybe I could show you pictures,

00:55:50.360 | but maybe it's a rainy day

00:55:52.200 | or maybe the windows in your house are foggy.

00:55:56.360 | So sometimes when I show you a zero,

00:55:59.320 | you might interpret it as a one.

00:56:01.680 | Or other times when I show you a one,

00:56:03.360 | you might interpret it as a zero.

00:56:05.800 | So if that's the case,

00:56:06.680 | that means when I try to send you this data,

00:56:08.880 | it comes to you in corrupted form.

00:56:11.080 | And so the challenge is how do you get it to be uncorrupted?

00:56:14.340 | In the 1940s, a computer scientist named Hamming

00:56:20.600 | addressed the problem of how do you reliably transmit

00:56:24.760 | digital information?

00:56:26.240 | And what he came up with was a brilliant idea.

00:56:29.600 | The way to solve it is that you take the data

00:56:32.160 | that you want to send,

00:56:33.200 | the ones in your strings of ones and zeros,

00:56:34.920 | your favorite string,

00:56:36.160 | and then you dump more ones and zeros in,

00:56:38.040 | but you dump them in in a particular pattern.

00:56:41.240 | And this particular pattern

00:56:42.920 | is what a Hamming code is all about.

00:56:45.320 | So it's an error correcting code,

00:56:46.600 | because if the person at the other end

00:56:48.360 | knows what the pattern's supposed to be,

00:56:49.800 | they can figure out when ones got changed to zeros,

00:56:52.200 | zeros got changed to one.

00:56:53.720 | So it turned out that our strange little objects

00:56:57.520 | that came from looking at the equations

00:56:59.320 | that we couldn't solve,

00:57:00.800 | it turns out that when you look at them deeply enough,

00:57:02.720 | you find out that they have ones and zeros buried in them,

00:57:07.500 | but even more astoundingly,

00:57:08.840 | the ones and zeros are not there randomly.

00:57:10.840 | They are in the pattern of error correcting codes.

00:57:14.180 | So this was an astounding thing

00:57:16.000 | that when we first got this result

00:57:19.000 | and tried to publish it,

00:57:20.000 | it took us three years to convince other physicists

00:57:21.960 | that we weren't crazy.

00:57:23.840 | Eventually we were able to publish it,

00:57:25.200 | I and this collaboration of mathematicians

00:57:27.400 | and other physicists.

00:57:29.360 | And so ever since then,

00:57:31.460 | I have actually been looking at the mathematics

00:57:34.400 | of these objects,

00:57:35.960 | trying to still understand properties of the equations.

00:57:39.220 | And I want to understand the properties of the equations

00:57:40.880 | 'cause I want to be able to try things like electrons.

00:57:43.320 | So as you can see,

00:57:44.320 | it's just like a two step remove process

00:57:46.280 | of trying to get back to reality.

00:57:48.440 | - So what would you say is the most beautiful property

00:57:50.960 | of these Dinkera graphs, objects?

00:57:55.960 | What do you think, by the way, the word symbols,

00:57:58.120 | what do you think of them, these simple graphs?

00:58:01.680 | Are they objects or are they--

00:58:04.240 | - They're, for people who work with mathematics like me,

00:58:08.320 | our mathematical concepts are,

00:58:11.560 | we often refer to them as objects

00:58:13.040 | because they feel like real things.

00:58:15.220 | Even though you can't see them or touch them,

00:58:17.880 | they're so much part of your interior life

00:58:21.120 | that it is as if you could.

00:58:23.800 | So we often refer to these things as objects,

00:58:26.080 | even though there's nothing objective about them.

00:58:28.520 | - And what does a single graph represent in space?

00:58:31.720 | - Okay, so the simplest of these graphs

00:58:34.120 | has to have one white ball and one black ball.

00:58:36.700 | That's that balance that we talked about earlier.

00:58:38.480 | Remember, we want to balance out the quadrants?

00:58:40.240 | Well, you can't do it unless you have

00:58:42.280 | a black ball and white ball.

00:58:43.840 | So the simplest of these objects

00:58:45.200 | looks like two little balls,

00:58:46.840 | one black, one white, connected by a single line.

00:58:49.440 | And what it's talking about is, as I said,

00:58:51.760 | a deep mathematical property related to symmetry.

00:58:54.680 | - You've mentioned the error-correcting codes,

00:58:56.280 | but is there a particular beautiful property

00:58:58.480 | that stands out to you about these objects

00:59:00.440 | that you just find?

00:59:01.480 | - Yes. - I mean, they're very--

00:59:02.480 | - Yes, there is. - Early on

00:59:03.620 | in the development. - Yes, there is.

00:59:05.880 | The craziest thing about these to me

00:59:08.800 | is that when you look at physics

00:59:14.200 | and try to write equations where information

00:59:17.040 | gets transmitted reliably,

00:59:18.600 | if you're in one of these supersymmetrical systems

00:59:22.240 | with this extra symmetry, that doesn't happen

00:59:24.560 | unless there's an error-correcting code present.

00:59:26.800 | So it's as if the universe says,

00:59:29.120 | you don't retransmit information

00:59:30.960 | unless there's something about an error-correcting code.

00:59:33.240 | This to me is the craziest thing

00:59:35.160 | that I've ever personally encountered in my research.

00:59:38.320 | And it's actually got me to wondering

00:59:41.040 | how this could come about,

00:59:42.480 | because the only place in nature

00:59:44.600 | that we know about error-correcting codes is genetics.

00:59:47.560 | And in genetics, we think it was evolution

00:59:50.200 | that causes error-correcting codes to be in genomes.

00:59:53.160 | And so does that mean that there was some kind of form

00:59:55.000 | of evolution acting on the mathematical laws

00:59:57.120 | of the physics of our universe?

00:59:59.440 | This is a very bizarre and strange idea,

01:00:01.560 | and something I've wondered about from time to time

01:00:03.420 | since making these discoveries.

01:00:05.400 | - Do you think such an idea could be fundamental,

01:00:08.200 | or is it emergent throughout

01:00:09.800 | all the different kinds of systems?

01:00:12.280 | - I don't know whether it's fundamental.

01:00:15.960 | I probably will not live to find out.

01:00:18.240 | This is gonna be the work of probably some future

01:00:20.760 | either mathematician or physicist

01:00:22.160 | to figure out what these things actually mean.

01:00:24.800 | - We have to talk a bit about the magical,

01:00:28.020 | the mysterious string theory, super string theory.

01:00:31.400 | - Sure.

01:00:32.240 | - There's still maybe this aspect of it,

01:00:35.440 | which is there's still, for me,

01:00:38.000 | from an outsider's perspective,

01:00:39.560 | this fascinating heated debate.

01:00:42.120 | On the status of string theory.

01:00:44.760 | Can you clarify this debate,

01:00:46.760 | perhaps articulating the various views,

01:00:48.800 | and say where you land on it?

01:00:50.880 | - So first of all, I doubt that I will be able

01:00:53.320 | to say anything to clarify the debate

01:00:55.840 | around string theory for a general audience.

01:01:00.840 | Part of the reason is because string theory

01:01:03.880 | has done something I've never seen theoretical physics do.

01:01:08.760 | It has broken out into consciousness

01:01:11.000 | of the general public before we're finished.

01:01:13.560 | You see, string theory doesn't actually exist.

01:01:15.960 | Because when we use the word theory,

01:01:17.320 | we mean a particular set of attributes.

01:01:20.240 | In particular, it means that you have an overarching paradigm

01:01:23.320 | that explains what it is that you're doing.

01:01:26.080 | No such overarching paradigm exists for string theory.

01:01:30.080 | What string theory is currently

01:01:31.960 | is an enormously large, mutually reinforcing

01:01:34.960 | collection of mathematical facts,

01:01:37.560 | in which we can find no contradictions.

01:01:39.640 | We don't know why it's there,

01:01:41.800 | but we can certainly say that without challenge.

01:01:44.920 | Now, just because you find a piece of mathematics

01:01:46.680 | doesn't mean that it applies to nature.

01:01:49.360 | And in fact, there has been a very heated debate

01:01:53.320 | about whether string theory is some sort of hysteria

01:01:57.400 | among the community of theoretical physicists,

01:02:00.120 | or whether it has something fundamental

01:02:01.600 | to say about our universe.

01:02:04.560 | We don't yet know the answer to that question.

01:02:08.440 | Those of us who study string theory will tell you

01:02:10.680 | are things like, string theory has been

01:02:13.400 | extraordinarily productive in getting us

01:02:15.360 | to think more deeply, even about mathematics

01:02:18.320 | that's not string theory, but the kind of mathematics

01:02:21.040 | that we've used to describe elementary particles.

01:02:23.880 | There have been spinoffs from string theory,

01:02:25.680 | and this has been going on now for two decades almost,

01:02:28.640 | that have allowed us, for example,

01:02:31.080 | to more accurately calculate the force between electrons

01:02:34.400 | with the presence of quantum mechanics.

01:02:36.720 | This is not something you hear about in the public.

01:02:39.240 | There are other similar things,

01:02:40.960 | that kind of property I just told you about

01:02:44.800 | is what's called weak-strong duality,

01:02:46.800 | and it comes directly from string theory.

01:02:49.000 | There are other things such as

01:02:51.920 | a property called holography,

01:02:55.560 | which allows one to take equations

01:02:59.680 | and look at them on the boundary of a space,

01:03:01.880 | and then to know information about inside the space

01:03:04.120 | without actually doing calculations there.

01:03:06.520 | This has come directly from string theory.

01:03:08.160 | So there are a number of direct mathematical effects

01:03:12.600 | that we learned in string theory,

01:03:14.240 | but we take these ideas and look at math

01:03:16.680 | that we already know, and we find suddenly

01:03:18.280 | we're more powerful.

01:03:19.520 | This is a pretty good indication

01:03:20.760 | there's something interesting going on

01:03:22.240 | with string theory itself.

01:03:23.240 | - So it's the early days of a powerful

01:03:25.040 | mathematical framework.

01:03:26.080 | - That's what we have right now.

01:03:27.320 | - What are the big, first of all,

01:03:29.800 | for most people, probably, which as you said,

01:03:33.560 | most general public would know actually

01:03:35.440 | what string theory is, which is at the highest level,

01:03:39.000 | which is a fascinating fact.

01:03:41.560 | - Well, string theory is what they do

01:03:43.160 | on the Big Bang Theory, right?

01:03:44.720 | (Lex laughing)

01:03:46.420 | - One, can you maybe describe what is string theory,

01:03:51.280 | and two, what are the open challenges?

01:03:55.200 | - So what is string theory?

01:03:57.480 | Well, the simplest explanation I can provide

01:04:02.000 | is to go back and ask what are particles,

01:04:06.080 | which is the question you first asked me.

01:04:08.580 | - What's the smallest thing?

01:04:11.720 | - Yeah, what's the smallest thing?

01:04:14.000 | So particles, one way I try to describe particles

01:04:19.000 | for people to start, I want you to imagine a little ball,

01:04:23.840 | and I want you to let the size of that ball

01:04:26.600 | shrink until it has no extent whatsoever,

01:04:29.880 | but it still has the mass of the ball.

01:04:31.840 | That's actually what Newton was working with

01:04:35.800 | when he first invented physics.

01:04:37.280 | He's the real inventor of the massive particle,

01:04:40.160 | which is this idea that underlies all of physics.

01:04:43.520 | So that's where we start.

01:04:45.480 | It's a mathematical construct that you get

01:04:48.100 | by taking a limit of things that you know.

01:04:50.300 | So what's a string?

01:04:52.880 | Well, in the same analogy, I would say,

01:04:55.320 | now I want you to start with a piece of spaghetti,

01:04:58.280 | so we all know what that looks like,

01:05:00.200 | and now I want you to let the thickness of the spaghetti

01:05:03.800 | shrink until it has no thickness.

01:05:06.560 | Mathematically, I mean, in words this makes no sense,

01:05:09.160 | but mathematically this actually works,

01:05:12.080 | and you get this mathematical object out.

01:05:14.500 | It has properties that are like spaghetti.

01:05:16.440 | It can wiggle and jiggle, but it can also move

01:05:20.000 | collectively like a piece of spaghetti.

01:05:22.520 | It's the mathematics of those sorts of objects

01:05:25.120 | that constitute string theory.

01:05:28.200 | - And does the multidimensional, 11-dimensional,

01:05:33.000 | however many dimensional, more than four dimension,

01:05:37.000 | is that a crazy idea to you?

01:05:38.920 | Is that the stranger aspect of string theory to you?

01:05:43.120 | - Not really, and also partly because of my own research.

01:05:48.120 | So earlier we talked about these strange symbols

01:05:51.640 | that we've discovered inside the equations.

01:05:54.160 | It turns out that to a very large extent,

01:05:56.120 | a dinkers don't really care about the number of dimensions.

01:05:58.480 | They kind of have an internal mathematical consistency

01:06:01.400 | that allows them to be manifest

01:06:03.040 | in many different dimensions.

01:06:04.920 | Since supersymmetry is a part of string theory,

01:06:07.380 | then this same property you would expect

01:06:09.280 | to be inherited by string theory.

01:06:11.440 | However, another little known fact,

01:06:14.480 | which is not in the public debate,

01:06:16.280 | is that there are actually strings

01:06:17.840 | that are only four dimensional.

01:06:19.820 | This is something that was discovered

01:06:21.520 | at the end of the '80s by three different groups

01:06:25.160 | of physicists working independently.

01:06:26.920 | I and my friend Warren Siegel,

01:06:29.480 | who were at the University of Maryland at the time,

01:06:31.600 | were able to prove that there's mathematics

01:06:33.720 | that looks totally four dimensional, and yet it's a string.

01:06:36.640 | There was a group in Germany

01:06:38.240 | that used slightly different mathematics,

01:06:40.840 | but they found the same result.

01:06:42.640 | And then there was a group at Cornell

01:06:44.400 | who using yet a third piece of mathematics

01:06:46.640 | found the same result.

01:06:47.480 | So the fact that extra dimensions

01:06:50.520 | is so widely talked about in the public

01:06:53.800 | is partly a function of how the public

01:06:55.760 | has come to understand string theory

01:06:57.360 | and how the story has been told to them.

01:06:59.640 | But there are alternatives you don't know about.

01:07:02.600 | - If we could talk about maybe experimental validation.

01:07:06.480 | And you're the co-author of a recently published book,

01:07:11.480 | Proving Einstein Right.

01:07:13.020 | The human story of it, too.

01:07:16.480 | The daring expeditions that change

01:07:18.200 | how we look at the universe.

01:07:19.960 | Do you see echoes of the early days

01:07:22.160 | of general relativity in the 1910s

01:07:24.840 | to the more stretched out to string theory?

01:07:29.840 | - I do, I do.

01:07:31.160 | And that's one reason why I was happy to focus

01:07:33.560 | on the story of how Einstein became a global superstar.

01:07:38.560 | Earlier in our discussion,

01:07:45.500 | we went over his history where in 1915

01:07:51.080 | he came up with this piece of mathematics,

01:07:53.920 | used it to do some calculations,

01:07:55.680 | and then made a prediction.

01:07:57.040 | But making a prediction is not enough.

01:08:00.160 | Someone's got to go out and measure.

01:08:02.040 | And so string theory is in that in-between zone.

01:08:07.000 | Now for Einstein, it was from 1915 to 1919.

01:08:09.920 | In 1915 he makes the correct prediction.

01:08:14.360 | By the way, he made an incorrect prediction

01:08:16.400 | about the same thing in 1911,

01:08:17.760 | but he corrected himself in 1915.

01:08:20.200 | And by 1919, the first pieces of experimental

01:08:23.760 | observational data became available to say,

01:08:28.040 | yes, he's not wrong.

01:08:30.160 | And by 1922, the argument based on observation

01:08:35.920 | was overwhelming that he was not wrong.

01:08:38.520 | - Can you describe what special

01:08:40.800 | and general relativity are just briefly?

01:08:42.680 | - Sure.

01:08:43.520 | - In the sense in what prediction Einstein made

01:08:45.720 | and maybe some or memorable moment

01:08:50.720 | from the human journey of trying to prove this thing right,

01:08:56.960 | which is incredible.

01:08:58.040 | - Right, so I'm very fortunate to have worked

01:09:02.560 | with a talented novelist who wanted to write a book

01:09:07.560 | that coincided with a book I wanted to write

01:09:09.760 | about how science kind of feels if you're a person.

01:09:14.880 | 'Cause it's actually people who do science,

01:09:17.160 | even though that may not be obvious to everyone.

01:09:19.740 | So for me, I wanted to write this book

01:09:22.680 | for a couple of reasons.

01:09:23.640 | I wanted young people to understand

01:09:26.480 | that these seeming alien giants that live before them

01:09:31.480 | were just as human as they are.

01:09:34.080 | - They get married, they get divorced.

01:09:35.800 | - They get married, they get divorced.

01:09:37.120 | They do terrible things, they do great things.

01:09:39.600 | They're people, they're just people like you.

01:09:42.200 | And so that part of telling the story

01:09:43.920 | allowed me to get that out there

01:09:45.240 | for both young people interested in the sciences

01:09:47.560 | as well as the public.

01:09:48.640 | But the other part of the story

01:09:52.440 | is I wanted to open up sort of what it was like.

01:09:57.440 | Now, I'm a scientist,

01:10:00.440 | and so I will not pretend to be a great writer.

01:10:02.680 | I understand a lot about mathematics,

01:10:04.700 | and I've even created my own mathematics

01:10:07.120 | that it's kind of a weird thing to be able to do.

01:10:12.000 | But in order to tell the story,

01:10:13.960 | you really have to have an incredible

01:10:17.360 | master of the narrative.

01:10:19.880 | And that was my co-author, Cathy Pelletier,

01:10:22.520 | who is a novelist.

01:10:24.080 | So we formed this conjoined brain, I used to call us.

01:10:27.620 | She used to call us Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle.

01:10:30.120 | My expression for us is that we were a conjoined brain

01:10:33.200 | to tell this story.

01:10:35.000 | And it allowed, so what are some magical moments?

01:10:39.760 | To me, the first magical moment in telling the story

01:10:43.880 | was looking at Albert Einstein and his struggle.

01:10:48.460 | Because although we regard him as a genius,

01:10:51.700 | as I said, in 1911, he actually made an incorrect prediction

01:10:54.480 | about bending starlight.

01:10:55.640 | And that's actually what set the astronomers off.

01:10:58.040 | In 1914, there was an eclipse.

01:11:02.200 | And by various accidents of war and weather

01:11:07.680 | and all sorts of things that we talk about in the book,

01:11:10.400 | no one was able to make the measurement.

01:11:13.080 | If they had made the measurement,

01:11:15.080 | it would have disagreed with his 1911 prediction.

01:11:20.140 | Because nature only has one answer.

01:11:23.600 | And so then you see how fortunate he was

01:11:27.760 | that wars and bad weather and accidents

01:11:32.160 | and transporting equipment stopped any measurements

01:11:34.800 | from being made.

01:11:36.020 | So he corrects himself in 1915,

01:11:38.080 | but the astronomers are already out there

01:11:40.340 | trying to make the measurement.

01:11:41.840 | So now he gives them a different number.

01:11:43.640 | And it turns out that's the number that nature agrees with.

01:11:46.800 | So it gives you a sense of this is a person

01:11:50.160 | struggling with something deeply.

01:11:52.340 | And although his deep insight led him to this,

01:11:57.040 | it is the circumstance of time, place and accident

01:12:01.760 | through which we view him.

01:12:03.920 | And the story could have turned out very differently

01:12:07.160 | where first he makes a prediction,

01:12:09.800 | the measurements are made in 1914,

01:12:12.080 | they disagree with his prediction.

01:12:13.760 | And so what would the world view him as?

01:12:15.800 | Well, he's this professor who made this prediction

01:12:17.720 | that didn't get it right.

01:12:19.520 | Yes?

01:12:20.680 | So the fragility of human history

01:12:25.680 | is illustrated by that story.

01:12:27.780 | And it's one of my favorite things.

01:12:29.720 | You also learn things like in our book,

01:12:32.640 | how eclipses and watching eclipses

01:12:35.080 | was a driver of the development of science in our nation

01:12:38.080 | when it was very young.

01:12:38.920 | In fact, even before we were a nation,

01:12:40.760 | it turns out there were citizens of this would-be country

01:12:45.760 | that were going out trying to measure eclipses.

01:12:49.680 | - So some fortune, some misfortune

01:12:54.120 | affects the progress of science.

01:12:56.920 | - Absolutely.

01:12:57.800 | - Especially with ideas as, to me at least,

01:13:01.920 | if I put myself back in those days,

01:13:03.760 | as radical as general relativity is.

01:13:06.560 | First, can you describe, if it's okay,

01:13:11.760 | briefly what general relativity is?

01:13:14.360 | And yeah, could you just take a moment of,

01:13:18.300 | yeah, put yourself in those shoes,

01:13:20.360 | in academic researchers, scientists of that time,

01:13:23.720 | and what is this theory?

01:13:25.200 | What is it trying to describe about our world?

01:13:28.800 | - It's trying to answer the thing

01:13:32.640 | that left Isaac Newton puzzled.

01:13:35.200 | Isaac Newton says, "Gravity magically goes

01:13:40.000 | "from one place to another."

01:13:41.800 | He doesn't believe it, by the way.

01:13:43.320 | He knows that's not right.

01:13:45.360 | But the mathematics is so good that you have to say,

01:13:48.120 | well, I'll throw my qualms away because I'll use it.

01:13:52.020 | That's all we used to get a man

01:13:54.260 | from the Earth to the Moon was that mathematics.

01:13:58.440 | So I'm one of those scientists, and I've seen this.

01:14:03.440 | And if I thought deeply about it,

01:14:04.900 | maybe I know that Newton himself wasn't comfortable.

01:14:07.600 | And so the first thing I would hope that I would feel is,

01:14:11.500 | gee, there's this young kid out there

01:14:13.120 | who has an idea to fill in this hole

01:14:16.060 | that was left with us by Sir Isaac Newton.

01:14:19.680 | That would, I hope, would be my reaction.

01:14:22.060 | I have a suspicion.

01:14:24.800 | I'm kind of a mathematical creature.

01:14:28.120 | I was four years old when I first decided

01:14:30.800 | that science was what I wanted to do with my life.

01:14:33.560 | And so if my personality back then was like it is now,

01:14:38.560 | I think it's probably likely I would have wanted

01:14:41.480 | to have studied his mathematics.

01:14:43.600 | What was a piece of mathematics that he was using

01:14:46.200 | to make this prediction?

01:14:47.660 | Because he didn't actually create that mathematics.

01:14:50.040 | That mathematics was created roughly 50 years

01:14:52.200 | before he lived.

01:14:53.280 | He's the person who harnessed it

01:14:55.400 | in order to make a prediction.

01:14:57.240 | In fact, he had to be taught this mathematics by a friend.

01:15:00.800 | So this is in our book.

01:15:01.960 | So putting myself in that time, I would want to,

01:15:07.780 | like I said, I think I would feel excitement.

01:15:09.320 | I would want to know what the mathematics is,

01:15:10.920 | and then I would want to do the calculations myself.

01:15:13.600 | Because one thing that physics is all about

01:15:16.660 | is that you don't have to take anybody's word for anything.

01:15:19.440 | You can do it yourself.

01:15:20.980 | - It does seem that mathematics

01:15:22.240 | is a little bit more tolerant of radical ideas,

01:15:24.640 | or mathematicians, or people who find beauty in mathematics.

01:15:28.820 | All the white questions have no good answer,

01:15:33.480 | but let me ask, why do you think Einstein

01:15:35.640 | never got the Nobel Prize for general relativity?

01:15:38.520 | He got it for the photoelectric effect.

01:15:40.320 | - That is correct.

01:15:41.140 | Well, first of all, that's something that is misunderstood

01:15:43.920 | about the Nobel Prize in physics.

01:15:46.080 | The Nobel Prize in physics is never given

01:15:49.160 | for purely proposing an idea.

01:15:53.180 | It is always given for proposing an idea

01:15:57.240 | that has observational support.

01:15:59.720 | So he could not get the Nobel Prize

01:16:02.360 | for either special relativity nor general relativity

01:16:05.320 | because the provisions that Alfred Nobel left

01:16:07.720 | for the award prevent that.

01:16:09.600 | - But after it's been validated,

01:16:13.600 | can he not get it then, or no?

01:16:16.080 | - Yes, but remember the validation

01:16:18.920 | doesn't really come until the 1920s.

01:16:21.680 | - Yeah, but that's why they invented

01:16:22.740 | the second Nobel Prize.

01:16:24.480 | I mean, Marie Curie, you can get a second Nobel Prize

01:16:28.120 | for one of the greatest theories in physics.

01:16:31.520 | - So let's be clear on this.

01:16:33.720 | The theory of general relativity

01:16:35.440 | had its critics even up until the '50s.

01:16:43.020 | So if the committee had wanted to give the prize

01:16:48.020 | for general relativity,

01:16:49.440 | there were vociferous critics of general relativity

01:16:54.180 | up until the '50s.

01:16:56.740 | Einstein died in 1955.

01:16:59.740 | - What lessons do you draw from the story you tell

01:17:03.740 | in the book, from general relativity,

01:17:05.660 | from the radical nature of the theory,

01:17:08.060 | to looking at the future of string theory?

01:17:12.920 | - Well, I think that the string theorists

01:17:14.580 | are probably going to retrace this path,

01:17:17.920 | but it's gonna be far longer and more torturous,

01:17:20.020 | in my opinion.

01:17:20.980 | String theory is such a broad and deep development

01:17:27.180 | that, in my opinion, when it becomes acceptable,

01:17:34.140 | it's gonna be because of a confluence of observation.

01:17:38.060 | It's not gonna be a single observation.

01:17:40.580 | And I have to tell you that,

01:17:42.040 | so I gave a seminar here yesterday at MIT,

01:17:46.480 | and it's on an idea I have

01:17:49.700 | about how string theory can leave signatures

01:17:52.380 | in the cosmic microwave background,

01:17:53.820 | which is an astrophysical structure.

01:17:56.740 | And so if those kinds of observations are borne out,

01:18:00.440 | if perhaps other things related to the idea

01:18:04.980 | of supersymmetry are borne out,

01:18:06.240 | those are gonna be the first powerful observationally-based

01:18:10.540 | pieces of evidence that will begin to do

01:18:15.380 | what the Eddington expedition did in 1919.

01:18:19.600 | But that may take several decades.

01:18:22.880 | - Do you think there will be Nobel Prizes

01:18:24.740 | given for string theory?

01:18:26.180 | - No.

01:18:27.300 | - Because decades.

01:18:28.360 | - Because I think the original,

01:18:29.420 | because I, it'll be,

01:18:31.180 | I think it will exceed normal human lifetimes.

01:18:34.980 | But there are other prizes that are given.

01:18:38.120 | I mean, there is something called the Breakthrough Prize.

01:18:42.200 | There's a Russian immigrant,

01:18:43.960 | a Russian-American immigrant named Yuri Milner,

01:18:47.200 | I believe his name,

01:18:48.380 | started this wonderful prize called the Breakthrough Prize.

01:18:52.020 | It's three times as much money as the Nobel Prize,

01:18:56.040 | and it gets awarded every year.

01:18:57.960 | And so something like one of those prizes

01:19:00.280 | is likely to be garnered at some point

01:19:02.600 | far earlier than a Nobel Award.

01:19:07.600 | - Jumping around a few topics,

01:19:09.720 | while you were at Caltech,

01:19:11.600 | you've gotten to interact,

01:19:13.600 | I believe, with Richard Feynman, I have to ask.

01:19:16.280 | - Yes, Richard Feynman, indeed.

01:19:19.080 | - Do you have any stories that stand out

01:19:20.560 | in your memory of that time?

01:19:21.400 | - Well, I have a fair number of stories,

01:19:23.200 | but I'm not prepared to tell them.

01:19:24.960 | They're not all politically correct,

01:19:26.840 | shall we say.

01:19:28.440 | Let me just say, I'll say the following.

01:19:31.080 | Richard Feynman, if you've ever read

01:19:34.000 | some of the books about him,

01:19:35.920 | in particular there's a book called

01:19:37.080 | "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman."

01:19:39.000 | There's a series of books that starts

01:19:41.520 | with "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman."

01:19:43.680 | And I think the second one may be something like

01:19:44.960 | "What Do You Care What They Say?"

01:19:46.080 | or something, I mean, the titles are all,

01:19:48.120 | there are three of them.

01:19:49.600 | When I read those books,

01:19:50.680 | I was amazed at how accurately

01:19:53.840 | those books portrayed the man that I interacted with.

01:19:57.160 | He was irreverent, he was fun,

01:19:58.920 | he was deeply intelligent,

01:20:01.600 | he was deeply human.

01:20:03.600 | And those books tell that story very effectively.

01:20:06.320 | - Even just those moments,

01:20:08.800 | how did they affect you as a physicist?

01:20:12.120 | - Well, it's funny because one of the things

01:20:16.920 | that, I didn't hear Feynman say this,

01:20:20.480 | but one of the things that is reported that he said

01:20:24.520 | is if you're in a bar stool as a physicist,

01:20:29.720 | and you can't explain to the guy on the bar stool

01:20:31.760 | next to you what you're doing,

01:20:32.880 | you don't understand what you're doing.

01:20:34.840 | And there's a lot of that that I think is correct,

01:20:40.760 | that when you truly understand something

01:20:46.720 | as complicated as string theory,

01:20:48.680 | when it's in its fully formed final development,

01:20:54.600 | it should be something you could tell

01:20:56.200 | to the person on the bar stool next to you.

01:20:58.960 | And that's something that affects

01:21:01.960 | the way I do science, quite frankly.

01:21:04.880 | It also affects the way I talk to the public about science.

01:21:08.160 | It's one of my mantras that I keep deeply,

01:21:11.520 | and try to keep deeply before me

01:21:13.720 | when I appear in public fora,

01:21:16.000 | speaking about physics in particular,

01:21:19.520 | and science in general.

01:21:21.160 | It's also something that Einstein said in a different way.

01:21:24.240 | He said, he had these two different formulations.

01:21:27.200 | One of them is, when the answer's simple, it's God speaking.

01:21:30.600 | And the other thing that he said was that

01:21:34.400 | what he did in his work was simply

01:21:37.560 | the distillation of common sense,

01:21:40.680 | that you distill down to something.

01:21:43.680 | And he also said, you make things

01:21:44.840 | as simple as possible, but no simpler.

01:21:46.760 | So all of those things, and certainly this attitude for me,

01:21:50.760 | first sort of seeing this was exemplified

01:21:53.360 | by being around Richard Feynman.

01:21:55.240 | - So in all your work, you're always kind of searching

01:21:57.400 | for the simplicity, for the simple, clear--

01:21:58.600 | - I am, ultimately.

01:22:00.200 | Ultimately, I am.

01:22:01.960 | - You served on President Barack Obama's

01:22:04.440 | Council of Advisors in Science and Technology.

01:22:07.640 | - For seven years, yes.

01:22:08.720 | - For seven years with Eric Schmidt

01:22:11.240 | and several other brilliant people.

01:22:13.360 | - Met Eric for the first time in 2009,

01:22:17.560 | when the council was called together.

01:22:19.840 | - Yeah, I've seen pictures of you in that room.

01:22:21.440 | I mean, there's a bunch of brilliant people.

01:22:23.040 | It kind of looks amazing.

01:22:24.440 | What was that experience like,

01:22:26.640 | being called upon that kind of service?

01:22:29.280 | - So let me go back to my father, first of all.

01:22:31.600 | I earlier mentioned that my father served

01:22:33.360 | 27 years in the US Army, starting in World War II.

01:22:37.000 | He went off in 1942, '43 to fight against the fascists.

01:22:42.000 | He was part of the supply corps that supplied

01:22:45.880 | General Patton as the tanks rolled across Western Europe,

01:22:48.560 | pushing back the forces of Nazism.

01:22:51.800 | To meet up with our Russian comrades

01:22:54.920 | who were pushing the Nazis, starting in Stalingrad.

01:22:59.680 | The Second World War is actually a very interesting

01:23:03.960 | piece of history to know from both sides.

01:23:08.400 | Here in America, we typically don't,

01:23:09.960 | but I've actually studied history as an adult,

01:23:12.480 | so I actually know sort of the whole story.

01:23:14.440 | - And on the Russian side, we don't know the Americans.

01:23:16.840 | We weren't taught the American side of the story.

01:23:19.200 | - I know, I have many Russian friends,

01:23:22.400 | and we've had this conversation on many occasions.

01:23:24.400 | - It's fascinating.

01:23:25.240 | - But you know, like General Zhukov, for example,

01:23:27.280 | is something that you would know about,

01:23:28.640 | but you might not know about a Patton, but you're right.

01:23:30.840 | So, Georgy Zhukov, or Rokossovsky,

01:23:34.760 | I mean, there's a whole list of names

01:23:35.960 | that I've learned in the last 15 or 20 years

01:23:38.920 | looking at the Second World War.

01:23:41.000 | So--

01:23:41.880 | - Your father was in the midst of that,

01:23:44.360 | probably one of the greatest wars in history.

01:23:46.560 | - In the history of our species.

01:23:49.440 | And so, the idea of service comes to me,

01:23:54.120 | essentially, from that example.

01:23:55.720 | So, in 2009, when I first got a call

01:24:02.640 | from a Nobel Laureate, actually, in biology,

01:24:08.040 | Harold Farmis, was on my way to India,

01:24:12.400 | and I got this email message,

01:24:13.640 | and he said he needed to talk to me,

01:24:15.560 | and I said, "Okay, fine, we can talk."

01:24:18.120 | I got back and states I didn't hear from him.

01:24:20.120 | We went through several cycles of this,

01:24:21.600 | sending me messages, "I wanna talk to you,"

01:24:23.320 | and then never contacted him.

01:24:24.800 | Finally, I was on my way to give a physics presentation

01:24:28.440 | at the University of Florida in Gainesville,

01:24:29.800 | and just had stepped off a plane,

01:24:33.600 | and my mobile phone went off, and it was Harold.

01:24:37.120 | And so, I said, "Harold, why do you keep sending me messages

01:24:40.360 | "that you wanna talk, but you never call?"

01:24:43.120 | And he said, "Well, I'm sorry,

01:24:44.320 | "things have been hectic, and da-da-da-da-da."

01:24:47.280 | And then he said, "If you were offered the opportunity

01:24:50.920 | "to serve on the US President's Council of Advisors

01:24:55.060 | "on Science and Technology, what would be your answer?"

01:24:58.400 | Now, I was amused at the formulation of the question,

01:25:02.440 | because it's clear that there's a purpose

01:25:05.040 | of why the question is asked that way.

01:25:07.520 | But then, he made it clear to me he wasn't joking,

01:25:12.480 | and literally, one of the few times in my life,

01:25:15.200 | my knees went weak, and I had to hold myself up

01:25:19.040 | against a wall so that I didn't fall over.

01:25:21.320 | I doubt if most of us who have been the beneficiaries

01:25:28.080 | of the benefits of this country,

01:25:29.920 | when given that kind of opportunity, could say no.

01:25:34.880 | And I know I certainly couldn't say no.

01:25:37.800 | I was frightened out of my wits,

01:25:39.600 | because I had never,

01:25:43.640 | although I have, my career in terms of

01:25:48.400 | policy recommendations is actually quite long,

01:25:51.680 | it goes back to the '80s, but I had never been called upon

01:25:55.480 | to serve as an advisor to a President of the United States.

01:26:01.880 | And it was very scary, but I did not feel

01:26:09.440 | that I could say no, 'cause I wouldn't be able

01:26:12.000 | to sleep with myself at night,

01:26:14.840 | saying that I chickened out or whatever.

01:26:17.960 | And so I took the plunge, and we had a pretty good run.

01:26:23.520 | There are things that I did in those seven years

01:26:27.160 | of which I'm extraordinarily proud.

01:26:30.320 | One of the ways I tell people is,

01:26:31.960 | if you've ever seen that television cartoon

01:26:34.240 | called Schoolhouse Rock, there's this one story

01:26:36.960 | about how a bill becomes a law, and I've kind of lived that.

01:26:40.480 | There are things that I did

01:26:42.960 | that have now been codified in US law.

01:26:45.580 | Not everybody gets a chance to do things like that in life.

01:26:49.800 | - What do you think is the, science and technology,

01:26:52.640 | especially in American politics,

01:26:54.780 | we haven't had a President who's an engineer or a scientist.

01:27:00.240 | What do you think is the role of a President,

01:27:02.040 | like President Obama, in understanding

01:27:05.720 | the latest ideas in science and tech?

01:27:07.440 | What was that experience like?

01:27:08.760 | - Well, first of all, I've met other Presidents

01:27:11.680 | beside President Obama.

01:27:12.720 | He is the most extraordinary President

01:27:14.760 | I've ever encountered.

01:27:16.720 | - Despite the fact that he went to Harvard.

01:27:19.960 | - When I think about President Obama,

01:27:23.440 | he is a deep mystery to me,

01:27:26.560 | in the same way, perhaps, that the universe is a mystery.

01:27:30.080 | I don't really understand how that constellation

01:27:32.640 | of personality traits could come to fit

01:27:36.940 | within a single individual.

01:27:38.600 | But I saw them for seven years,

01:27:41.000 | so I'm convinced that I wasn't seeing fake news.

01:27:44.120 | I was seeing real data.

01:27:45.640 | He was just an extraordinary man.

01:27:47.780 | And one of the things that was completely clear

01:27:50.640 | was that he was not afraid

01:27:55.000 | and not intimidated to be in a room of really smart people.

01:28:01.200 | I mean, really smart people.

01:28:03.800 | That he was completely comfortable

01:28:07.120 | in asking some of the world's greatest experts,

01:28:10.840 | what do I do about this problem?

01:28:12.640 | And it wasn't that he was going to just take their answer,

01:28:15.680 | but he would listen to the advice.

01:28:17.640 | And that, to me, was extraordinary.

01:28:21.260 | As I said, I've been around other Executives

01:28:23.200 | and I've never seen one quite like him.

01:28:26.040 | He's an extraordinary learner, is what I observed.

01:28:30.480 | And not just about science.

01:28:33.080 | He has a way of internalizing information

01:28:35.720 | in real time that I've never seen in a politician before,

01:28:39.320 | even in extraordinarily complicated situations.

01:28:42.640 | - Even scientific ideas.

01:28:43.880 | - Scientific or non-scientific.

01:28:45.280 | Complicated ideas don't have to be scientific ideas.

01:28:48.120 | But I have, like I said, seen him in real time

01:28:50.320 | process complicated ideas with a speed that was stunning.

01:28:53.260 | In fact, he shocked the entire Council.

01:28:56.560 | I mean, we were all stunned at his capacity

01:29:01.480 | to be presented with complicated ideas

01:29:05.480 | and then to wrestle with them and internalize them

01:29:08.800 | and then come back, more interestingly enough,

01:29:11.600 | come back with really good questions to ask.

01:29:14.200 | - I've noticed this in the area that I understand more

01:29:17.360 | of artificial intelligence.

01:29:19.440 | I've seen him integrate information

01:29:21.960 | about artificial intelligence and then come out

01:29:24.360 | with these kind of Richard Feynman-like insights.

01:29:27.560 | - That's exactly right.

01:29:28.600 | And that's, as I said, those of us who have been

01:29:31.920 | in that position, it is stunning to see it happen

01:29:34.320 | because you don't expect it.

01:29:36.200 | - Yeah, he takes what, for a lot of sort of graduate students

01:29:40.400 | takes like four years in a particular topic

01:29:42.480 | and he just does it in a few minutes.

01:29:44.200 | - He sees it very naturally.

01:29:45.600 | - You've mentioned that you would love to see

01:29:48.440 | experimental validation of super strength theory

01:29:52.060 | before you--

01:29:53.240 | - Before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

01:29:56.500 | - Which the poetry of that reference made me smile

01:29:59.400 | when I saw it.

01:30:00.780 | - You know, people actually misunderstand that

01:30:02.440 | because it's not what, it doesn't mean what we generally

01:30:05.700 | take it to mean colloquially,

01:30:06.980 | but it's such a beautiful expression.

01:30:08.660 | - Yeah, it is.

01:30:09.500 | It's from the Hamlet to be or not to be speech,

01:30:14.120 | which I still don't understand what that's about,

01:30:15.780 | but so many interpretations.

01:30:17.920 | Anyway, what are the most exciting problems in physics

01:30:23.060 | that are just within our reach of understanding

01:30:25.620 | and maybe solve the next few decades

01:30:27.700 | that you may be able to see?

01:30:29.020 | - So in physics, you limited it to physics.

01:30:33.140 | - Physics, mathematics, this kind of space of problems

01:30:36.740 | that fascinate you.

01:30:37.840 | - Well, the one that looks on the immediate horizon

01:30:42.020 | like we're gonna get to is quantum computing.

01:30:44.300 | And that's gonna, if we actually get there,

01:30:47.900 | that's gonna be extraordinarily interesting.

01:30:50.900 | - Do you think that's a fundamentally problem of theory

01:30:54.320 | or is it now in the space of engineering?

01:30:56.180 | - It's in the space of engineering.

01:30:57.340 | I was out at Q Station, as you may know,

01:31:01.700 | Microsoft has this research facility in Santa Barbara.

01:31:06.700 | I was out there a couple of months in my capacity

01:31:10.060 | as a vice president of American Physical Society.

01:31:12.820 | And I got, you know, I had some things

01:31:14.780 | that were like lectures and they were telling me

01:31:16.640 | what they were doing.

01:31:17.700 | And it sure sounded like they knew what they were doing

01:31:20.660 | and that they were close to major breakthroughs.

01:31:24.000 | - Yeah, that's a really exciting possibility there.

01:31:26.680 | But back to Hamlet, do you ponder mortality?

01:31:31.680 | - No. - Your own mortality?

01:31:32.920 | - Nope.

01:31:33.760 | My mother died when I was 11 years old.

01:31:36.180 | And so I immediately knew what the end of the story was

01:31:41.180 | for all of us.

01:31:42.820 | As a consequence, I've never spent a lot of time

01:31:45.880 | thinking about death.

01:31:47.960 | It'll come in its own good time.

01:31:50.200 | And sort of, to me, the job of every human

01:31:54.480 | is to make the best and the most of the time

01:31:56.680 | that's given to us in order, not for our own selfish gain,

01:32:01.240 | but to try to make this place a better place

01:32:05.040 | for someone else.

01:32:06.180 | - And on the why of life, why do you think we are?

01:32:13.720 | - I have no idea and I never even worried about it.

01:32:17.720 | For me, I have an answer, a local answer.

01:32:21.120 | The apparent why for me was

01:32:22.680 | because I'm supposed to do physics.

01:32:25.260 | - But it's funny because there's so many other

01:32:28.400 | quantum mechanically speaking possibilities in your life,

01:32:33.460 | such as being an astronaut, for example.

01:32:35.720 | - So you know about that, I see.

01:32:37.320 | (laughing)

01:32:39.160 | Well, like Einstein and the vicissitudes

01:32:46.000 | that prevented the 1914 measurement of starlight bending,

01:32:51.000 | the universe is constructed in such a way

01:32:53.740 | that I didn't become an astronaut,

01:32:55.140 | which would have, for me, I would have faced

01:32:57.440 | the worst choice in my life,

01:33:00.160 | whether I would try to become an astronaut

01:33:04.560 | or whether I would try to do theoretical physics.

01:33:07.440 | Both of these dreams were born

01:33:09.120 | when I was four years old simultaneously.

01:33:11.640 | And so I can't imagine how difficult

01:33:14.680 | that decision would have been.

01:33:17.000 | - The universe helped you out on that one.

01:33:19.520 | - Not only on that one, but in many ones.

01:33:21.760 | It helped me out by allowing me to pick the right dad.

01:33:25.400 | - Is there a day in your life you could relive

01:33:27.900 | because it made you truly happy?

01:33:29.720 | What day would that be, if you could just look back?

01:33:32.720 | - Being a theoretical physicist

01:33:35.480 | is like having Christmas every day.

01:33:37.480 | (laughing)

01:33:39.000 | I have lots of joy in my life.

01:33:43.160 | - The moments of invention, the moments of ideas,

01:33:46.000 | revelation, just-- - Yes.

01:33:47.760 | The only thing that exceed them are some family experiences,

01:33:51.560 | like when my kids were born and that kind of stuff.

01:33:54.840 | But they're pretty high up there.

01:33:56.840 | - Well, I don't see a better way to end it, Jim.

01:34:00.520 | Thank you so much.

01:34:01.360 | It was a huge honor talking to you today.

01:34:03.280 | - This worked out better than I thought.

01:34:05.400 | (laughing)

01:34:06.840 | - Glad to hear it.

01:34:08.600 | Thanks for listening to this conversation

01:34:10.320 | with S. James Gates Jr.

01:34:12.120 | And thank you to our presenting sponsor, Cash App.

01:34:14.840 | Download it and use code LEXPODCAST.

01:34:17.400 | You'll get $10, and $10 will go to FIRST,

01:34:20.200 | a STEM education nonprofit that inspires

01:34:22.280 | hundreds of thousands of young minds

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01:34:27.640 | If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube,

01:34:30.180 | give it five stars on Apple Podcasts,

01:34:32.200 | support it on Patreon, or connect with me on Twitter.

01:34:35.520 | And now, let me leave you with some words of wisdom

01:34:38.320 | from the great Albert Einstein for the rebels among us.

01:34:42.720 | "Unthinking respect for authority

01:34:44.960 | "is the greatest enemy of truth."

01:34:48.160 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

01:34:51.260 | (upbeat music)

01:34:53.840 | (upbeat music)

01:34:56.420 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Jim Gates: Supersymmetry, String Theory and Proving Einstein Right | Lex Fridman Podcast #60

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